Bearly Accidental (Accidentally Paranormal Book 12) (2 page)

Ohhh, Marty sure was damn angry Nina had chosen humanity. Almost as though being human was going against her belief system—a betrayal of some kind. But wait. Were Marty and Wanda vampires, too?

How could
he
tell? He was still learning to parse scents, but he had no clue what a vampire would smell like anyway.

Nina’s deep dark eyes went wide with hot fury, her next question asked in total girlish horror. “
Did you just call me fat?
”

Marty sucked her cheeks in, making her lips purse, as though she were utterly appalled. “I did no such thing. I said
a
body part was increasing. Which, like I’ve been saying, isn’t a surprise, seeing as you’ve made it your mission to work your way through an entire ice cream case at the grocery store one pint of Ben & Jerry’s at a time.”

Nina pulled one of her hands from her incredibly bulky down jacket and gave Marty the finger before she began an awkward attempt to unwrap a bite-size Snickers with gloves so thick, she fumbled and dropped it smack in the snow.

“Oh, fuck you, Werewolf. If you couldn’t eat real food for eight GD years like the blood diet I’ve been on, once you got your hands on some vittles, your ass’d be the size of a freightliner. Wait. It
is
the size of a freightliner. So quit paranormal-shaming and piss the hell off!”

Picking up the fallen Snickers, Nina held it up to the sky, kissed it and popped it in her mouth, smiling in defiance at Marty as she chewed.

Okay, so Marty was a werewolf. Arooooooo.

Interesting.

Wanda closed her eyes before lifting her face to the heavens and blowing out a disgusted sigh.

Clearly, she’d asked the universe for patience on more than one occasion.

When her eyes popped open again, she looked as though she’d come to terms with her lot in their friendship. “Look, if the two of you are going to argue, I’ll just do this alone. We’re here to find Cormac, and find Cormac I darn well will. After what the Great and Wonderful Roz told us, we need to find him. All we have to do is locate him, fix the problem, and we go home. Now, I’m going to do that. With or without you two pains in my derriere.”

With that, Wanda stomped up the hill at a speed so rapid; he almost couldn’t believe he was actually witnessing a feat so incredible.

But then he reminded himself,
you turn into a grizzly bear at random, moron
. At least, that’s the breed of bear he thought he was, but it was all still very unclear. Even after three years and fifty or so romance novels on the subject of bear shifting—his only resource for research.

And hello. What was there to find at all unusual about a woman who moves at the speed of light or, for that matter, a werewolf and a former vampire who knew someone named the Great and Wonderful Roz?

Nothing. That’s what. Who was he to discriminate when all he needed was a mama bear and baby bear to complete this nightmare of a fairytale gone painfully awry?

So whoever these women were, they were like him—whatever that meant. They clearly understood what had happened to him. And they knew his sister.

And she is alive.

Christ, Cormac had to hold on to the tree he was propped up against to keep from crashing to the floor of the forest in relief.

All this time, three solid years, hiding out in this prison that was frozen more often than not, trying to find out what happened to Toni without being discovered himself had been a continual nightmare.

So why not go and introduce yourself to the nice, if not squabbly ladies, Cormac? Find out what they’re up to?

Because how did they know Toni? Maybe they worked for Stas, the fuck who’d kidnapped his sister to begin with and owned every cop this side of the universe. Maybe these women were just his polite henchmen. Okay, so the Nina woman wasn’t so nice, but maybe these paranormal people stuck together, and finding Cormac meant they got some kind of bounty.

He did have very sensitive information—even if the police wouldn’t take him seriously.

You’re paranoid—she is alive and well, Vitali. Look at them—look at all three of them. All drama doused with perfume, pricey boots, and potty mouths. Do they really look capable of working for a freak like Stas?

No. But one could never be too paranoid when it came to what had happened to him and Toni three years ago. Nope. He was going to silently wait this one out.

The last time he’d rushed, he was turned into a goddamn grizzly bear.

So wait he damn well would.

Quietly. From behind them, as they all began to move upward and far too close to his cabin for comfort.

Flexing his fingers, he felt the phantom ache of his missing digit, hacked off by none other than Stas himself, a total maniac who just happened to be his sister Toni’s ex-boyfriend and a mid-level player in a much bigger Russian mob organization.

A noise behind him, subtle, maybe even only in his mind, made him forget about the ache in his finger and stand up straight.

Cormac tilted his head again and sniffed the air. If there was anything valuable in this crazy-ass transformation he’d gone through, it was his heightened sense of smell.

It was badass. He could scent a fish from a mile down the creek, a bush full of ripe berries football fields away. In fact, in the beginning of whatever had happened to him, he could scent everything. For a time, it had been unnerving, but over the course of the last three years, he’d grown accustomed to it, nurtured it, and read fiction to try to understand it.

And what he smelled was perfume. Light, fruity. Maybe peaches and tangerines? None of the three women were wearing anything fruity. In fact, Nina wasn’t wearing anything at all but the scent of Buffalo wings and Coors Light with a hint of Kit Kat bar.

Cormac whipped around as the women continued upward, closer and closer to the only place he felt even remotely safe.

His eyes scanned the dollops of snow like whipped cream on the trees, the landscape hilly and covered in rocks, looking for this new scent, but seeing nothing.

Must be his damned imagination.

“Wait the fuck up, for Christ’s sake!” Nina yelled to her counterparts, struggling to push her way through the deep snow. “Jesus, this isn’t the flippin’ Olympics, Color Wheel Queen!”

“I told you that backpack would weigh you down, didn’t I? You only have a side of beef in it. Now pick up the pace, Ex-Vampire!” Marty shouted back, her devilish giggle swirling around the forest like tinkling fairies.

“I was packing just in case, all right? You don’t know how the fuck long we’re gonna be out here in the Hundred Acre Wood. I wanted to be prepared,” she gasped.

“Hah! You could feed a small country with what’s in that backpack and it has nothing to do with anyone but you and your bottomless pit of a stomach!” Marty chirped.”

“One more crack about my fat keister and I’ll haul your ass up that mountain and drop you from the tippy-top!”

As Cormac listened to them argue, following behind them, hopping from tree to tree, snowdrift to snowdrift, he caught the scent again, distracting him from formulating a plan about what to do with these women.

Sweet and soft, it grazed his nostrils before it slipped away.

He’d purposely covered his scent the moment he’d spotted the three of them from across the river. It seemed ridiculously cautionary at the time, but he’d learned the hard way never to expose himself. Now that he knew at least one of them was a werewolf, he was glad he’d taken the time to roll in some mud and leftover fish guts.

Just as the women peaked the top of the hill and Wanda yelled out, “Oh my God, I think I found it!” he smelled that perfume again.

That was probably five seconds before something sharp and pointy jabbed him in the side of his neck and he howled his outrage, before falling to the frozen ground and passing out cold.

A
s the great Sheldon would say, bazinga!

Theodora “Teddy” Gribanov smiled in satisfaction as she eyed her prey from more than a hundred yards away.

Hah. Her older twin brothers, Vadim and Viktor, could essentially suck it. She still had it and she had it hard. Grabbing her phone from her backpack, she zoomed in and snapped a picture of Cormac Vitali’s still body, lying in the snow as though he were merely napping, and sent it off to her brother with the subject, “Neener-Neener-Neener!”

Jamming the phone back into her pack, she hauled it over her shoulder and pushed her way up the small incline to stand over this enormous man she’d just taken down with a dart gun.

He was worth a lot of money.

A lot. Money she’d gladly collect and stuff away in her bank account until the time came to figure out how to save the part of her life that was her heart and soul.

For right now, all she wanted to do was teach her mouthy brothers a lesson about patience and perseverance, and the fact that, despite their ribbing her about being a candy-ass, she wasn’t such a rainbow Skittle after all.

For a moment, she wondered who those women Cormac had been following were and if they were here for the same reason she was.

That would piss her off. A deal was a deal,
comrade
. Vitali was hers—which meant she needed to move quickly in case they’d heard his yelp through all that squealing they were doing up over the rise of the hill.

Kneeling, she was relieved to hear the voices of the three bickering women were still distant, but she couldn’t quite catch what they were saying.

Not that it mattered. She was going to haul Cormac Vitali out of this forest, lob him into her battered truck and bring him in—then do a drive-by at the bank, where she’d withdraw her hefty paycheck.

Jamming her hands under his torso, she ignored how muscly he was, how thick his thighs were, and the fact that he had silky chestnut-brown hair sprouting from beneath his knit cap.

She also managed to ignore his stench. Why he’d covered himself in mud, fish guts, and whatever that salty hint of schmeg was, she had no clue.

Don’t worry about who he is or what his predicament is, Teddy. It’s what makes you too soft for this shit. Toughen up and imagine dollar signs on his forehead instead of trying to peer into his soul to see if his heart beats true. Bad guys are bad guys.

Viktor’s taunting but stern words just before she’d left Denver came back to haunt her.

Okay, so she liked to look further than the paycheck. But looking at Cormac, his eyelashes fluttering against his ruddy cheeks, lean and chiseled, wasn’t hard to do.

If one of her brothers had just tranq’d a hot babe, she’d entirely expect them to wonder what had brought their prey the misfortune of meeting the stealthy tip of a dart gun.

But they were slobbering Neanderthals, and they cared about one thing and one thing alone. Cash.

Well, to be fair, they cared about her, too. Which was why they’d taken her out of the game for so long.

But she was better now.

You’re nothing, Teddy. Nothing.

Fuck you,
she silently spat.

Teddy bit the inside of her cheek to fight the nausea. She damn well
was
better, and it was time to stop being the biggest sissy this side of the Mountain time zone and get ’er done. She needed this money.

Her hands only shook a little as she pulled Cormac’s limp form to her chest, and she was proud to say she flung his body over her shoulder fireman style, her knees only buckling a little before she wobbled and righted herself, her teeth tightly clamped.

Rolling her head from side to side to ease the tension in her neck, she grunted as she began to make her way down the hill.

Jesus, he was heavy, and the fact that he was out cold made him heavier. Condensation puffed from her lips as she dragged her still-out-of-shape body down the hill and toward the river. She’d better pump up her jam if she hoped to get him to the truck and tie him down before the effects of the dart gun wore off.

But then two things happened at once.

Those three loud, constantly arguing women must have caught sight of her because there was a whole lot of caterwauling coming at her from behind.

Simultaneously, Cormac stirred, struggling against the hold she had on him at the back of his knees.

“What the fu…?” he yelped. His upper body, thick against her smaller shoulder, began to rear up.

She’d had a bad feeling the tranq gun didn’t have enough sedative in it to contain someone his size, but she’d doubted her assessment at the last minute and decided to only nail him with one dart.

Just another poor judgment call on her part, she thought with a grunt as Cormac wrapped his arms around her thighs and, with his abs of steel, managed to take her down by tipping her backward, using the weight of his body and the press of his bent knees. They fell against the packed snow, making her cry out on impact and sending her backpack flying.

He rolled from her and, before Teddy even realized where he was, Cormac pounced, pushing her back into the snow, knocking the wind right out of her.

“For the love of fuck, what’s going on, Marty?” one of the women bellowed as she ran down the hill, just as the other two appeared above Teddy.

Two lovely, put-together women with eyes of ragey-ish suspicion and their hands on their slender hips.

“Oh! Aren’t you pretty? Doesn’t she have lovely eyes poking out from that ugly-ugly mud-brown hat, Wanda?” the blonde with sparkling sapphire-blue eyes asked.

“Not the time for a color wheel assessment, Marty!” said the woman with an air of sophistication and the smoothest hair she’d ever seen in all of Colorado.

Teddy attempted to shake the snow from her face and wrestle her way out from beneath this enormous beast of a man. She was no weakling, but damn he was strong.

Gripping her wrists with a single calloused hand, Cormac yanked them over her head, pulled the dart from his neck and hurled it to the ground, then growled down at her, full of fire and brimstone, “
Who
the hell are you?”

The woman who’s going to slap your ass in the pokey and collect a lot of cash?
Probably not the way introductions should go if she was to keep her identity a secret.