Bearly Accidental (Accidentally Paranormal Book 12) (6 page)

“You’re awfully vague, aren’t you?” Marty said in the most pleasant of ways, yet there was the underlying subtext of her suspicion in every word.

She’d purposely kept her answers vague. The less she lied, the less she had to recall. “It’s a little personal, I suppose.”

Nina swiveled around on her chair and made a face, licking her thumb clean of the remaining salt from her potato chips. “Vague means get off the broad’s back and mind your own damn beeswax, Marty. Jesus and the moose lodge. It’s not your job to figure out the direction her hormones are pointed or anything else that has to do with her. That’s not why we’re here.”

Score one for the ex-vampire Nina. She was proving useful.

But Marty waved her off in a dismissive flick of her hand. “It’s just girl talk, Nina. Something you’d know nothing about.”

The undercurrent of anger in Marty’s words gave Teddy pause. Why was she so angry with Nina and why did she care? But it gave her the opportunity to divert the conversation. “So why are
you
all here?”

Marty’s pink-glossed lips instantly thinned, though she quickly slapped a phony smile on and a wide-eyed expression of innocence graced her face. “Just visiting.”

Now Teddy was suspicious. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she stuck her toe in the deep end of the pool. “It didn’t sound like Cormac knew you…”

“He’s a friend of a friend.”

Nina’s chair scraped abruptly against the floor. “Look,
Teddy,
here’s the score. We don’t know you and you don’t know us. It’s none of your damn business how we know the big dude or why we’re here. So let’s quit pussyfootin’ around until we figure this out and someone tells us we have to be one big happy paranormal family, okay?”

Marty groaned, dropping her head into her hands. “Nina. Don’t be so rude.”

“Aw, fuck you and your rude. I’m still just as sick and tired of pretense as I ever was. Even more tired of the cat-and-mouse bullshit we play every time we run into someone with secrets. And you got secrets,
Theodora
. I damn well know you do. I’m just not that interested in ’em. So if you don’t want to tell us your secrets, we’re not gonna ask about ’em. But that means you can’t ask about ours either. Cormac’s with us and he’s not goin’ anywhere without us from now until we say other-fucking-wise. So deal with your own shit and we’ll deal with ours.
Capisce
?”

That had gone south fast. And she sure as shit did have secrets. Still, the hell she was laying all her cards on the table before she knew if these women were bad guys, too.

“So the pajama party is off?” she joked, knowing full well it would get under Nina’s skin.

“Yep. And so is braiding your hair and doing your fucking nails. Got it?”

Rising from her chair, Teddy held her head high and reached for her vest. “Loud and clear. Now, if you ladies don’t mind, I have to make a phone call. I have family waiting to hear from me and I can’t seem to get a signal inside the cabin. Is that all right, or do you want to babysit me outside, too?”

“Fuck that. It’s a million below out there in the tundra,” Nina groused, rubbing her long arms with her hands.

She looked to Marty, who’d also risen, for permission to leave the premises.

Marty gave her a short nod and a no-nonsense gaze. “Stay within sight and keep in mind, I’m a werewolf. We’re slicker n’ snot. I imagine we’re much faster than a bear. I can and will outrun you, Teddy. Also note: I have big, ugly, drooly teeth. I’ll use them. Don’t go far.”

Without a word, Teddy made her way out of the kitchen and toward the purple door, swinging it open while trying to keep her cool.

Once outside, she stomped through the snow toward the clothesline, right in Marty’s line of vision, where she could watch Teddy from the window by the door, but she hoped far enough away to go unheard. Digging her cell phone from the back pocket of her jeans, she held it up, hoping to get a signal.

If she’d lied about most everything else, she hadn’t lied about not being able to get a single bar on her phone.

With shaking fingers, she scrolled her screen and almost cheered when she saw the bars light up. Hitting autodial, she called Vadim, praying he wasn’t off somewhere on the ranch.

Just as the line began to ring, she caught movement from the left side of the cabin. A rustle of fallen leaves, the very slight crunch of snow.

Instantly, Teddy crouched, tucking her body so she managed to stay out of sight. The scent of cigarette smoke whispered under her nose. Smoke and sweat.

How strange. No one in the cabin smelled of smoke…

She decided to investigate. Turning her phone to silent, she slipped it back in her pocket and dove for a path Cormac must have dug from the side of the cabin to the front pathway. He’d piled the sides high enough with snow that she’d be able to observe without being seen. Rolling to her side, she scrambled to her haunches, shook off the snow and crouched down to assess.

Her heart began to throb in her chest for no apparent reason. Something wasn’t right. She felt it. Smelled it. Knew it deep in her gut.

Poking her head over the snowbank, Teddy narrowed her gaze, sniffing the air to recapture the scent of the cigarette and focusing in on the location it came from.

A hunter maybe? Who hunted at night…and wasn’t this part of the forest preserved? A poacher? The son of a bitch. Was he a poacher looking for illegal pelts?

And that was when she finally located him. A dark, bulky figure, hunched over by a pile of freshly cut wood, holding a sniper rifle.

Hold the phone.
A sniper rifle?
What kind of hunter used a sniper rifle? Or was this guy here for the women? Or worse, Cormac?

Was he out here for someone else? Another inhabitant of the cabin maybe? Maybe they were looking for this Toni they were all talking about?

Craning her neck, Teddy slid silently down along the bank of snow until she had a better view of the guy. That was when she saw the laser site, gleaming and red.

She had to keep herself from scoffing at how amateur a laser site on a sniper rifle was.

Sissy.

And then she saw
whom
, not what, he was aiming for. The red beam flashed at the window of the cabin as he lined up his mark.

Her eyes flew open and her hands broke out into a clammy sweat. His mark was Cormac.

Dread filled the pit of her stomach, her heart crashed so hard, it was likely to fall out of her chest. What kind of shit was her life mate into?

Tall and strong, Cormac stood right in front of the streaked glass pane, talking to Wanda, who was over his shoulder as he sipped a beer with the light from the site aimed right at his heart.

Holy hell, he was aiming for Cormac.

Without thinking of anything other than stopping whoever it was with their finger on the trigger from killing Cormac, she launched over the snow bank, head down, mouth wide open.

“Cormac, duuuuuuck!” Teddy hollered as she landed by the front door with a grunt before tucking and rolling. Scrambling to her feet, she heard the gun go off just above her head, pinging what sounded like metal.

There was no time to think as she made a break to the left side of the cabin, crawling her way toward the pile of wood where the shooter was located.

Shots fired, zigzagging and pinging off every area of the cabin, becoming more erratic with each bullet. Someone wanted him dead, and they wanted him dead
bad
.

She had nothing to defend herself with, no weapon to speak of, but clearly she had to do something because this moron wasn’t leaving without Cormac.

There was all manner of yelling and carrying on coming from inside the cabin as chaos ensued. Someone yelled her name, but she ignored it in favor of catching this son of a bitch who’d dared to take a shot at the man she was destined to spend the rest of her life with—despite the fact that they knew absolutely nothing about one another, and Cormac was an alleged bad guy.

He continued to shoot wildly at the cabin, which suggested desperation on the sniper’s part. Something she didn’t understand. Unless…

There was no time to figure out his motivation. He was taking potshots with careless abandon—someone was going to end up hurt.

Grabbing one of the freshly chopped logs, she peered into the velvety night, found her victim, and with a grunt of a cry, lobbed the heavy piece of wood directly at his head.

It slammed into the side of his skull with a satisfying
thunk
, but it didn’t take him out. Not by a long shot. Instead, it made him angrier.

“Teddy! Where the hell are you?” Marty cried, barreling out the door and directly into the fray.

Just as the werewolf poured out of the cabin, Cormac and Wanda followed suit, with Nina on the fringe, and they were headed directly in the path of the shooter.

“Nina, stay in the cabin before you get yourself killed!” Wanda screamed.

She had to do something, and do it fast.

So she did the only thing she knew to do. Charge the son of a bitch and pray all those old tires she’d jumped through over and over while her brothers trained her had done a good job of teaching her how to bob and weave.

Threading her way toward the man with the gun, she ducked in an erratic pattern, moving in and out of the shadows as she heard the shooter begin to retreat. His footsteps were easily identifiable just up ahead, heavy and clunky; he tore his way toward the hill.

With his back to her, Teddy decided, it was now or never. No way was she letting this guy go so he could roam freely, and chance he might come back for round two at another time.

With a guttural growl, Teddy launched herself at his back, aiming for the dark coat he wore with the sole purpose of knocking him to the ground and finding out who the hell he was.

She hit him with a bone-crunching thud, her body bouncing on his spine, his gun getting air and dropping out of his grasp before she pinned him and grabbed him by a thatch of his greasy hair, dragging his head upward so she could get a good look at his face.

“Who the hell are you?” she roared down at him.

He paused for only a moment, a brief, eerily suspended moment, before he smiled and held up a gleaming knife, jamming it into her side.

Her scream ripped from her throat when the knife sliced into her like a hot poker, searing her flesh. A scream of horror, defeat, pure rage emitted from somewhere deep within her chest. Blood began to gush from her side, warm and sticky, the scent coppery and thick.

The shooter tossed her off as though she weighed no more than a feather, leaving her in a gasping lump on the cold ground.

But she’d seen the son of a bitch.

And he looked just like one of the mug shots she’d seen on Cormac’s computer screen before he’d shut them down.

* * * *

Cormac scooped Teddy up as gently as possible, brushing her hair from her face as the women twittered around him.

“I can walk,” she said with a protest, trying to lift out of the cradle of his arms.

“I bet. You can also bleed,” he murmured back. “You’re making a pretty big mess, you know.”

“I’ll try harder to keep my bleeding on the inside the next time I chase after a guy who’s trying to kill you. Care to explain what that was about?” She hissed the words while trying to reposition herself to ease the sting of her wound.

Cormac looked her directly in the eye and shook his head, his beautiful lips moving in precise motion. “Nope.”

“You do know life mates share everything, don’t you?” She went for the joke in the hopes he’d bite.

“I know no such thing.” He continued to crunch through the snow, keeping her tight to his chest.

Okay, he wasn’t biting. Fine. There’d be time for warm-fuzzies and long walks on the beach later. For now, someone was trying to kill Cormac.

Why the fuck was someone trying to kill Cormac? There’d been no mention of anyone else hunting him…

Marty’s face appeared to her right, masked in worry, her blue eyes wide. “Oh my God, Teddy! You ran right after him like you were part of the SWAT team! It was incredible—and plum nuts. He could have killed you.”

She waved Marty off. If she only knew the half of what she’d run into, around, over and under in order to make some cash. “I’m fine. Promise. I heal pretty quickly. Maybe not as quickly as you ladies do, but fairly fast. It’ll pass.”

“That was absolutely crazy, Theodora Jackson, and you’d better never do it again on my watch,” Wanda ordered as she grabbed her fingers and gave them a squeeze.

Nina greeted them at the door, holding it open and pointing to the couch with mismatched cushions. “Put Rambo’s ass there. I’ll clean her up.”

Cormac set Teddy down on the surface with careful hands while Wanda and Marty plumped a throw pillow behind her and settled her in.

“Do you have a first-aid kit, dude?” Nina asked Cormac, wincing when she saw the blood at Teddy’s side.

He pointed to the cabinet in the kitchen while Wanda and Marty made her raise her arms so they could peel her jacket off and lift her shirt up.

As they peeled her shirt from her skin, she hissed her pain, biting back a scream of agony. Fuck that hurt, and if she ever caught the bastard who’d knifed her in the gut, she was going to rip his heart out by digging her way inside his chest with a goddamn spoon.

Nina pushed her way into the fray, settling between Teddy’s knees, first-aid kit in hand. “Fuck all if that’s not deep, kiddo. Marty, get me some hot water, a cloth and some of that booze Yogi Bear’s hiding under the sink.”

Had Nina’s tone changed? Was that concern in her voice? Teddy was certain it was worry.

What happened to “you deal with your shit and I’ll deal with mine”?

Marty brought all the items and set them on the floor by Nina’s feet. The ex-vampire grabbed the bottle of Jack and dumped it on a cloth. “This shit’s gonna hurt like a fucking bitch. Ten bucks and a bag of my gummi bears says you scream.”

Teddy sucked in a breath, her toes curling inside her boots. “You’re on, and if you just give it a chance to heal—”

“It’s still gotta be cleaned, moron. What if something slows up the healing? You wanna wander around with your intestines gushing outta your side? I’ve been hurt a time or twenty. I think I know what I’m talking about.”