Laid Bear 2: The Kodiak Clan (3 page)

Not that having them so close was always a good thing — like the time a drunk Kimmy forgot which apartment was hers and stumbled in while Bethany was straddling Max on the couch — but for the most part, their proximity was a comfort to her. Especially since the harassment started and her family lived across the country.

She got up and poured Kimmy her own cup, tipping in two packets of sweetener, just how she liked it. “Here you go, Sleeping Beauty. Maybe this will help you wake up. What time did you get in, anyway?”

Kimmy eyed her darkly. “What are you, my mom?” She grabbed the cup and took a sip, moaning with pleasure. “Aaaah.”

“Slut didn’t drag her used-up ass home till five, if you can believe it,” Paul said, rolling his eyes. “Don’t you think she’s a little long in the tooth to be pulling all-nighters?”

“I’m sitting right here, dickpig. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”

“Doing so might actually make my eyes bleed, but thanks for the offer.”

“All right, enough, you two,” Bethany interjected. “Kimmy, drink your coffee. Paul, lay off.”

“Fine,” Paul huffed as he pushed back from the table and moved over to a wall hanging. It was a small frame high up on the wall, probably higher than a piece of art should be. He stood on his tiptoes to get a better look.

“B, what’s this?”

“What’s it look like?”

“Well, from here it looks kinda like…bullets?”

“Shell casings, actually, but yes.”

Kimmy got up to join him. She flicked a glance back at Bethany, who sat there sipping her peppermint tea. “They look like silver or something.”

“You got it.”

The pair looked at each other. Paul finally shrugged and asked the question Bethany was waiting for. “I’ll bite. Why are there two silver bullets…excuse me,
shell casings
framed on your wall?”

She’d already told them about Max — though it took a shifting demonstration from the man himself to fully convince them — and was grateful that they didn’t freak out too much. Kimmy went on a bender for about three days but came back and gave Max a big hug. Paul had been more reserved but was coming around. He’d always been very protective of his best girl, Bethany.

“They came from the bullets that killed Max’s parents.”

They slowly turned to face her. “Holy shit,” breathed Kimmy. “They were murdered?”

“Max thinks so,” she nodded, pushing around a coffee ground that was stuck to the side of her mug. “But he also says that hunting accidents happen every year, where a werebear is in bear form and a human hunter kills it, assuming it was a real bear.”

“But…but don’t they, ya know, sort of morph back into their human form when they die?” Kimmy sat down across from her while Paul stood stock still, listening.

Bethany shook her head. “No, it’s not like that. It’s not like they’re humans who have a magic spell cast on them that allow them to shift. They’re really half-bear, half-human. So whatever form they’re in when they die, that’s the form their bodies stay in.”

Paul finally found his words. “So…these bears that are killed by hunters…”

She nodded somberly in response, understanding what he was asking. It made her sick to her stomach to think about.
 

“What?” Kimmy’s gaze bounced between them. She was a little slow on the uptake this morning…oops, afternoon.

Neither one of them said anything, just looked at her for a moment. Understanding flashed in her eyes and she blanched. “No! They
eat
them?!”

Bethany grimaced but nodded. “Or stuff them or whatever they do for trophies.”

“Is that what happened to Max’s parents?” Paul asked quietly.

She shrugged. “Dunno. Max doesn’t think it was an accident but he doesn’t like to talk about it. All I know is that those are the casings from the bullets that killed them.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes before Paul cleared his throat. “So when they die, they keep the form they’re in at that moment, but some of their senses cross over, right? I think you told me that they’re still sentient or whatever when they’re morphed, didn’t you?”

“That’s right. And when they’re human, they have, like, supersonic hearing. Like Bionic Woman hearing.”

“Whoa.” Kimmy glanced at Paul. “So can he, um, hear through walls and stuff?”

Bethany laughed as her friend turned a brilliant shade of crimson. “I’m sure he can. Why? What did you do in my old bed?”

“Nothing! Well, I mean,
something
but only that once. I didn’t even like it that much, I swear!”

Laughter filled the room as Bethany and Paul clutched their stomachs in glee, wondering just what the hell their adventurous friend had been doing, but
really
not wanting to know.

“Well, fuck you both. I’m gonna go shower.” Kimmy pushed back from the table and huffed her way out the door.

Paul caught his breath in time to shout, “Thank God!”

As their laughing fit died away, Bethany gathered up the empty cups and started washing them, grateful to have her friends so close.
 

“So how’s it going, B? Things calming down?”

She shrugged. “We’re still getting the occasional middle-of-the-night phone call, but not very many anymore. Max is meeting with his superiors right now, which is completely killing me with worry.”

“But I thought he’d already told them about you and the baby, and that they were fine with it.”

She chuckled bleakly. “I wouldn’t say they were ‘fine’ with it. They insisted on meeting me and educating me on werebear-human relations. It was actually pretty fascinating stuff. Did you know there are whole villages in Europe where humans not only know about weres but accept them as equals? There have even been a number of matings but they seem to be pretty rare. Plus they keep the secret from the outside world. It’s pretty cool.”

“And the baby?”

Bethany smiled and looked down at her ever-expanding bump. At the tail end of her final trimester, it wasn’t so much a bump as a mountain.
And there’s still a month or so left to go
, she thought, imagining that her nine-month belly would rival Mt. Everest in size.

She turned to Paul, leaning back against the counter and rubbing her tummy. “He’s doing great.”
Or so says Dr. Graves
, a niggling voice in the back of her mind whispered.
Shut up
, she told it.

“He?! I thought you weren’t going to find out the sex! Ohmigod, I have to call Charlotte—“ Paul gasped and slapped a hand across his mouth. “I’m so sorry, B. I totally forgot.”

At the mention of her former best friend’s name, the smile fell from her face, her heart was gripped with sadness — and she wasn’t going to lie, a tinge of anger. She turned back to the counter and started wiping it down with a rag so he wouldn’t see the tears forming.
 

“It’s fine, Paul. She couldn’t handle the truth about Max. Nothing I can do about it. At least she promised to keep our secret. For that I’m grateful.”

He sidled up next to her and rubbed her back gently. He knew perfectly well that it had a calming effect on her. Ever since she was a little kid, she found a hand on her back soothing. She took a deep breath and smiled at him, a single tear spilling down her cheek.

“So it’s a boy?” His voice was gentle as he tried to divert her thoughts.

Her blonde ponytail swished against her back as she shook her head. “Dunno. I’ve decided to alternate pronouns because I can’t stand calling my baby ‘it’.”

“Ah. Very smart.”

Bethany continued to awkwardly clean the already-clean counter as Paul stood there stroking her back. “Well, sweetie, I’m going to see what my clinically horny roommate is up to. I’ll talk to you later.”

She tilted her head to accept his cheek kiss but didn’t watch him leave. The moment the back door slid home, a solitary sob wracked her body. A few more tears trickled down her cheeks, but she swallowed her despair over losing her best friend. She’d grieved long enough. These were happy times and, though she’d welcome her friend back with open arms, she had to move on.

With a lighter heart than just a moment before, Bethany made her way to the living room — sticking her tongue out at the scowling African mask in the hall as she walked by — and eased herself onto the couch. She found this was the most comfortable spot for her to sit, though getting up was a bitch.

Setting her laptop on top of a flat pillow that was perched atop her belly, she brought up a search engine. She had yet to respond to Veronica’s email because she wasn’t sure what to say.
 

“My first client and I can’t even help her,” she mumbled as she typed in ‘Werebears Alaska’.
 

The first dozen pages were filled with results about video games and shifter romance books, but deep into her search, she found an ancient blog post ridiculing a pseudo-scientific paper that claimed werebears were real. The post didn’t name the author of the paper — the blogger probably didn’t want to risk getting sued — but it did mention that they found it in the dusty stacks of “a major Washington state university.”
 

Bethany searched for ‘washington state university’ and clicked the most obvious link. It took nearly an hour of digging on various sites and pages, but she eventually found a listing of all the theses presented by Ph.D. candidates for the past 40 years or so. A search for the word ‘werebear’ yielded no results, but eventually she found a paper titled
The Existence and Effects of Mammalian Lycanthropes Throughout Ancient and Modern History
by Theodore Scantling, Ph.D.c , written in 1989.

“Yes!” she hissed to herself when she discovered it had been scanned and uploaded to the university’s servers. For $5, she was able to download it to her computer, all 300 pages of it.
 

Her foot tapped an impatient rhythm on the Turkish carpet as she waited for the document to download and open. This was the first possibly-legitimate item she’d found on the existence of werebears, and she’d spent a fair amount of time looking over the past several months.
 

From the moment she started reading the treatise, her eyes started drooping from boredom.
This guy is dry as toast
, she thought as she skimmed page after page of boring hypothesis.
 

“Lycanthropes have played a small but vital role in the history of global societies for millennia. Every European culture claims the existence of such creatures, which include a variety of apex predator species, most notably those belonging to the families Canidae, Felidae and Ursidae.”

Geez, what a snore-fest
, she thought as she clicked through looking for something interesting. When she reached the section titled ‘Lycanthropes in Modern Culture’, she slowed down. The writing was as dry as ever, but the author made a compelling case for the existence of werewolves, werecats and especially werebears. He even claimed to have witnessed one shifting in his youth.
 

An hour had passed by the time she reached the last page. “Though the scientific community might scoff, the evidence is clear and irrefutable: Lycanthropes exist and have infiltrated every culture in the world.”

The sound of Max’s keys in the lock drew Bethany’s gaze. She couldn’t help herself. Every time he entered a room, her pulse beat just a little faster. And every time, he gave her the smile he was giving her now. Beaming and warm, with a touch of devilry thrown in for good measure.
 

“Hey, babe…and baby,” he said, leaning down to kiss her forehead and then her belly. She buried her fingers into his thick dark hair while he murmured a greeting to his cub in his clan’s native tongue. She was picking up a word here and there, but it was a difficult language and she had little hope of ever becoming fluent.

As he pulled away, he glanced at her laptop. “What’s this?”

“Oh, it’s actually pretty interesting. This guy wrote his doctoral thesis on how lycanthropes are real. He has a lot of stuff right, from what I can tell.”

“What’s his name? Scanty or something?”

“Scantling. You’ve heard of him?”

“Yeah, rings a bell,” he said, standing and stretching his back, his rippled abs peeking out from under the hem of his tight black t-shirt. “If I remember right, the rest of his world thinks he’s a nutjob. That paper made him a laughingstock. Wasn’t he booted out of his program over it?”

Bethany shrugged. “He seems to have a lot of details.”

He nodded, his expression pinched. “Yeah, if it’s the guy I’m thinking of, he wormed his way into one of those tiny mixed villages in Eastern Europe. No one had a clue he was trying to gather evidence of our existence. It was a pretty big deal at the time, but I was just a kid back then. In fact, the Brotherhood was formed not long after that to encourage clans to withdraw from human communities.”

“Veronica mentioned something called the Brotherhood in her email.”

His thigh muscles rippled against his jeans when he sank into the couch next to her and kicked his feet up on the coffee table. His bulging bicep was warm against the back of her neck as he pulled her closer.
 

“Yup. It started innocently enough but, over the years, it’s morphed into something pretty ugly, kind of a Bear Power-type of movement. Members think nothing of terrorizing werebears who befriend — or God forbid fall in love with — a human. It wasn’t until they killed the human husband of a high-ranking werebear that they were officially denounced.”

“But they’re not gone, are they?”

“Nope. They just went underground. Unfortunately, many clan leaders know who among them are members — hell, some of
them
are in the Brotherhood — but they usually just let them do their thing, turn a blind eye.”

Memories of late-night phone calls calling her horrible names, threatening her baby or saying nothing at all flooded her brain. “That’s who’s been bugging us, isn’t it?”

Max frowned and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “Most likely.”

An icepick of fear stabbed at her gut. “Are…are they dangerous?” she whispered.

“Nah,” he said dismissively. He unwrapped his arm from her shoulder and pushed off the couch, heading to the kitchen. The distinctive sound of a cap being twisted off the top of a beer bottle reached her ears.