Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (21 page)

She was breathing hard, kinda wheezing. “I told you. I swear to God if you do that again, I’m... just put me down! Put me down and I’ll take you to Celia the easy way. Keep this up and it’s gonna hurt a,” she paused when Orion brought the stick near her mouth and she just had to lash out at it. Frustrated, the little thing shook her head.

“It’s gonna hurt?” Orion laughed smugly. “What is?” Again he teased her with the stick, again, she lunged.

Her teeth clattered, and the squirrel shook, and then she clamped her jaws down on the splintering wood. Her teeth hung, and in one smooth motion, Orion dropped the stick and grabbed the squirrel by the scruff of her neck, holding her in such a way that she couldn’t scratch, couldn’t bite.

Then again, he was holding her in both hands, and having to strain to keep her from twisting away. She sputtered and spat, and finally managed to detach the stick from her mouth. “I warned you! You screwed with Billie one too many times! And then that stick thing? That was one step too damn far!”

“Billie,” he said. “That’s right. I remember that beaver squawking your name. I’m a little confused though, what, exactly did you warn me about?”

Billie twisted around in Orion’s hands, not trying to get away but obviously trying to see something or someone, out in the woods. “Just keep taunting me, fluffy,” Billie said with a sneer. “Just keep on keepin’ on. Shit’s about to get
real
.”

Orion scoffed. “What are you—”

That’s when the sound of leaves hit him like a truck in the face. It wasn’t just rustling, wasn’t just wind going through the leaves and pine needles. It sounded urgent, desperate, like a horde of locusts devouring a field – just that inevitable, infinitely growing din of...

Squirrels
.

Orion snapped to attention, hurled Billie to the side and crouched, letting his muscles rip through his clothes and the golden fur stream out of his pores. Of all the ridiculous things he’d seen, this? This just about had to be the stupidest.

He thrashed his massive jaws left and right, snapping at the empty night air.

But then, his teeth clamped down on something else – something that scratched at the inside of his mouth until he released.

One set of claws turned into four. One mouth to eight. Suddenly, not only was Orion being attacked by a tidal wave of furious squirrelly assailants, he was being
overwhelmed
by them. As fast as he could, he snapped his jaws or swiped a paw. Each one took out several of the pint sized jerks, but it was no use. The faster he knocked them to the side, the sooner another wave attacked.

Blood ran down the sides of Orion’s face, and welled up out of a thousand tiny wounds on his face, shoulders, arms and neck. Every inch of his body stung like absolute hell. Cold wind whipping through the forest made it even worse, and when he finally fell, toppled by the onrush, the dirt in his cuts made him roar in pain.

Orion looked up, pinned by the world’s most absurd ambush.

Helplessly, he watched as the horde bound his wrists, and even though he damn near got a leg out – and took out five or six squirrels when he did – they caught him again, tying off his ankles.

And then, as if to appear and rub salt in his wounds, that nasty little mutant, Billie, reappeared, with a smarmy grin and his backpack.

“So, fluffy,” she squeaked.

You have no idea how angry that makes me.

“Want to be a dentist?” she hissed the last syllable. “The old biker gang tough act not something you want to keep doing forever?”

The only thing in Orion’s mind was Clea, sleeping peacefully, oblivious to anything going on, although she wouldn’t be for long. Dawn was coming on fast.

“Teeth are a noble profession,” Orion snarled as he shifted back into human form. “And anyway, you’re just a thug no better than the gang. Or me, I guess.”

“Difference,” Billie clicked her teeth. “I’m doing this for a paycheck, yeah, but I’m also doing it because I’m helping Celia protect the forest! You? You were just doing it—”

“Because I had no
choice
,” Orion hissed.

Billie shrugged. “Either way. Oh, what is this?” she tossed his dentistry textbook on the ground, followed by his beat up crank radio, and then held onto his philosophy text and let the backpack slide off of it, into a rumpled pile in the dirt. She waddled up and stuck it in his face. “Oh we’ve got dog-eared pages. Don’t you know not to do that?”

She waved a finger in Orion’s face. He drew his lips back in a silent growl. Apparently, taunting him from the ground wasn’t good enough. Tiny claws jabbed Orion’s skin as the curious-looking creature walked up his legs over his belly and stared right in his face. “Why do I get the feeling I’m about to open this book to some ironic passage?”

Sticking her diminutive thumb between the pages, Billie opened the book, squinted a little, and then let out a very pleased “ha!”

Orion struggled, but the binds were tight enough that all his struggling earned him were burns on his wrists where the plastic bit into his skin.

“Oh man, yeah, this could not possibly be better.” At length, Billie quoted the part in
The Illiad
she’d opened to, and then laughed out loud when she finished. “Maybe next time you could learn a lesson from the shit you read, fluffy. Pop quiz. What killed Achilles?”

Orion narrowed his eyes to slits. Rage boiled up inside him, but more than rage, more than hate, was the terrible feeling that he’d let Clea down. She was going to wake up and find him gone and not know why. Good thing he’d left that note, but still. It was cryptic, and he had no idea when – or even
if
– he’d ever see her again.

He clenched his jaws as Billie clicked her teeth. “Time’s up,” she said. “Arrogance. Outrageous arrogance. Hubris, pride, whatever you want to kill it.” She chuckled. “Well, I meant ‘whatever you want to call it’ but ‘kill it’ works too.”

She tapped her foot, slowly, rhythmically, on Orion’s chest for a few moments before she hopped to the ground and threw his book over her shoulder with a
thump
. “Drug him, bag him, and throw him in the van,” she said.

“Wait! Wait, I—”

Was all Orion managed to stammer before whatever it was that coursed through his veins took hold, freezing his muscles and knocking him out cold. His eyes drooped, his mouth went slack, and his fingers fell, lifeless on the ground beside him.

“That went faster than I thought,” Billie said, looking down at his prone, limp body with something resembling concern. “You sure you dosed him right?”

“Yep!” one squirrel piped up. “Just like you said, one full needle!”

“I... uh, yeah that’s not really what I meant. That’s enough for like thirty doses.”

“Me too!” another one said, chipper as anything. “Got him just like you said!”

Billie cocked her head to the side and pursed her lips in a moment of thought. “So that’s...” she counted on her fingertips, then her toes, then back to her fingers. “Well whatever, I’m just glad he’s a big boy. He ain’t much use to anybody dead, even as a rug.”

The squirrels all tittered for a second, then filed off one at a time.

“What a day,” Billie said, pulling out a tiny pack of cigarettes, and taking a drag. “What a damn day.”

As the squirrels maneuvered underneath Orion and around him, to cart him off to the waiting van, Billie made sure to get one good kick in at his ribs.

––––––––

“A
re we done yet?” Celia Maynard paced back and forth, staring over the edge of the river – the last river – she still needed to dam. “I’m so ready to go home and have a nice pint of whiskey and a bath.”

“You mean a pint of beer, right?” Billie asked. “A pint of whiskey is—”

“Shut up, no, I mean what I said!” Celia was at the phase of excitement where it’s very difficult to tell if it’s excitement or anger or confusion. “Celia Maynard means what she means and says what she does and does what she talks about!”

Billie took a deep breath, and leaned backwards against the tree that was just about to make history.

“Ready, boss!” Another of the squirrels, one who wore a nametag with “L-241” on it. Celia thought it best to refer to the workers by numbers instead of names. It eliminated the possibility they’d think she liked them.

In the three months since she’d started damming up Jamesburg’s rivers, they had all been successfully blocked, and thanks to the fact that this last one was so damn big, water had kept right on flowing through the town. No one noticed the rest of the rivers with the Greater James continuing to fill the reservoirs. After this though? Holy
shit
was Celia excited to see the look on that arrogant prick of an alpha’s face.

“Where’s that bear?” Celia asked Billie, almost as an afterthought. “I thought you caught him? Mitch’s stupid kid. The one who saved that girl from being punctured and saved me from a life sentence?”

“I think you’ll probably still get one. I mean, damming up a town and then breaking all the dams at once to flood the place out is probably somewhere on the same criminality scale as dropping a tree on a—”

“Shut
up
,
Billie!
The bear! Where is the bear? Focus, focus, focus.”

“I
am
a squirrel,” Billie offered. “If you want undying focus you should maybe have picked an elephant underling.”

Celia squinted at her goon, frowning and shaking her head. “An elephant underling? That’s just... stupid!”

As Billie watched her boss, trying to figure out something to say, a van appeared, ambling down the rickety side road leading to Celia’s camp. The driver’s side window opened, and H-135 squeaked to Celia. “We got him, boss! But he’s not exactly... easy going.”

“Didn’t you drug him?” she asked and then turned to Billie. “I thought you were supposed to drug him. How the hell am I going to hold a wide awake, pissed off bear so big he terrified an entire gang full of mercenary idiots? I thought you were supposed to drug him?”

She was cranked up already, but the thought of having to somehow contain Orion Samuelsson, conscious? That was just one step over the line of sanity for Celia, who didn’t take that line very seriously. Billie, for her part, wasn’t speaking, just nodding.

When Celia finally wound down, Billie took her turn. “Yes boss, we drugged him. Actually we drugged him
way
more than we should have. Although as it turns out, ‘way more than we should have’ actually meant ‘just enough’ because if we’d only given him the one shot of that stuff, it never would have worked.”

“How much did you give him?” Celia demanded, “for posterity. I need to know how much to shoot up the next bear I have to kidnap for a hillbilly biker gang to get their services for free.”

Billie shrugged and looked over at the tiny guy driving the van. “Five, or so. I think. Maybe six.”

“Oh, CCs?” Celia asked. “That’s not mu—”

“Five or six needles full,” the guy answered.

“Full?” Celia said, starting to get excited. “Like
full-
full?”

“Yup!” the squirrel driver answered. “Packed to the brim!”

Celia narrowed her eyes. “And he’s not dead?”

“Nope! Just coming around! And he’s
mad
too!”

As if to punctuate what the little guy said, something hit the side of the van so hard that the entire vehicle rocked up onto one side of wheels before collapsing back to the ground.

“Five or six needles
full
?” Celia asked again. “And he’s still doing that?”

The van rocked in the other direction, going up on two wheels and then crashing back down. Just as it hit, Orion slammed into the other side, rocking it just a little further than last time. Just a few more pitches and that thing was going to be toppled over, rolling down the side of the hill, and falling into the river.

Celia didn’t mind that, exactly, it’s just that she wasn’t sure if Mitch Samuelsson would take his son dead instead of alive in trade for his help with these dams. Help Celia had never really figured out how to pay for, exactly. So, it was really nice when he asked for the kidnapping.

But even with the momentary relief from non-payment, she still had a giant bear, who was apparently not taking to a massive amount of sedatives in quite the way he should. It was hard for her to comprehend how powerful he must be to take... what did all that add up to? A gallon? Yeah, must’ve been about a gallon she figured, of whatever the stuff she’d shot him up with was.

She was deep in thought. So deep in thought, in fact, that when the van tipped all the way onto its side, Celia was staring off into space trying to figure out what to do with a massive, caged bear.

“Celia!” Billie squeaked, “We got a problem!”

The door on the back of the van exploded outward, blasting off the hinges. What emerged was something entirely unbelievable to the four and a half foot beaver girl. “Holy
shit
,” Celia said, “I mean, I’ve seen him before, but he’s just so,” she trailed off for a moment. “Holy
shit
.”

Billie hopped deftly up on the arm of the chair where Celia was standing. “He’s... yeah, he certainly is something,” she said. “But we gotta deal with him!”

Celia was just staring at the rampaging bear, and shaking her head. “And he did all that with his arms tied behind his back? Like literally, this isn’t just a kid who says he’s going to do something with his arms tied behind his back and then tries once, gets irritated and uses both his arms. This guy—”

“We hogtied him,” Billie added. “After we drugged him, the squirrels hogtied him. Did a good job too. He just, well you can see what he did.”

“Those arms,” Celia was just watching as the bear swung his head left and right, his eyes blazing. “They’re so, he’s so...”

“Big?” Billie asked, trying to be helpful.

“That doesn’t even... that’s like someone saying ‘oh yeah, the sun? It’s pretty hot,’ you know?”

Orion unleashed a roar so crazed and savage that Celia’s heart shuddered. “I kinda just want to let him go, just to see,” Celia said. “I may or may not be having second thoughts about this whole blowing up the town thing. Do you think I could convince him to run away with me? Maybe tell him if he did, that I’d stop threatening the town?”