Black Bear Rising: A BWWM Paranormal Romance (Black Bear Saga Book 1)

BLACK BEAR RISING

by Tia Wilson

Copyright © 2015 by Tia Wilson

Cover Design by Super Kawaii

Cover image from Super Kawaii

Book design by Tia Wilson

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

First Published: November 2015

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**Authors Note - If you haven't read the two short stories that kick off the beginning of this novel, I have included them as bonus content. Click the below links to jump straight to the shorts.**

Black Versus White Bonus Short 1

Bear Back Rider Bonus Short 2

**Note If you haven’t read the first two short stories that begin the series, they are included in this book as bonus content. Scroll back a couple of pages for the links to jump straight to the short stories.**

Tom was standing out on the porch of the cabin and Grace went outside and joined him. A low mist clung to the ground and Grace got the creeping feeling that a withered hand was going to claw its way above the undulating surface any second now. Tom stood rigid, his shoulders back as he tilted his head to the side.

“Whats wrong?” Grace asked in a whisper.

“Listen,” Tom said.

Grace listened and she couldn’t hear a thing, what was it Tom was hearing she wondered, maybe a car approaching from the distance? “I don’t, hear anything.”

Tom nodded his head as he scanned back and forward across the dense tree beyond the clearing in front of the cabin. Tom reached down and patted his trouser pocket and his keys jangled. He lowered his voice and said, “As soon as I hand you the keys make a run for the car. Don’t look back and stop for no one.” He took his keys out of his pocket palming them out of view. Grace reached down and took them and looked towards the car. It was close, maybe twenty-seconds to run to it and another few to open it and speed away.
 

She looked at Tom feeling more frightened than she had ever felt. His eyes seemed to flicker from a blue to a deep brown as if she was viewing them through a kaleidoscope. He squeezed her hand and then bolted for the car. She was half way there when a figure burst out of the woods and ran towards her. She made out a flash of his metal teeth and dropped the key as she reached the car. She scrambled in the dirt and grabbed up a pile of wet leaves and the key. She glanced back and Tom had the assailant in a headlock from behind and he was punching him in the kidneys.

Her hands shook as the key skittered past the impossibly small keyhole until it finally slid home and the car door swung open. She gunned the engine and looked back again. Tom was on the ground with his legs and arms wrapped around the attacker who was flailing weakly as the breath was squeezed out of him. “Tom,” she screamed as two more figures ran from behind the cabin and towards him.

“Go!” Tom shouted at her as he jerked the man’s neck back sharply.

The cars wheels spun as they found purchase in the loose soil and she turned the wheel towards the winding road that lead away from the cabin. A figure ran out from the woods and jumped onto the hood of her car. He grabbed onto the hood and smashed his head into the windscreen, the glass cracked in a web of snow white cracks. Grace screamed and jammed on the brakes. The man scrabbled at the hood as he flew forwards and landed on the ground kicking up a cloud of dust.

Grace glanced backwards and saw a black bear standing on its hind legs and slashing its huge clawed fist through the torso of his attacker. Blood sprayed in a red mist as the man fell to the ground clutching his chest. Two other men circled the bear at a distance,both men baring and snapping there metallic teeth in the bears direction.

Something moved in the corner of Graces vision and she looked around. Her attacker was getting to his feet and wiping himself off. He smiled at her and snapped his teeth together. The clang of metal on metal made Graces skin prickle and crawl. She slammed down the accelerator and slammed into the man. His body flipped like a rag doll through the air and he hit the back of the car and rolled off as Grace sped away.
 

She checked the rear view mirror and the man stayed on the ground unmoving. The view of the cabin and Tom was blocked by the trees. Her leg felt like an iron rod welded to the foot of the cars floor as she sped along the winding road and away from the cabin. As she approached the main road up ahead Grace was finally able to reduce her speed and she pulled over, her breathing coming in rapid gasps. Her chest hurt like someone was standing on her and she couldn’t seem to get enough air into her. What do I do, she thought to herself. Tom had told her to go north, but she had no idea where to.

The steering wheel groaned as she gripped it vice like. She slowed her breathing and let go of the wheel and looked back down the road. There was no sign of Tom. I better keep driving she thought to herself. She started the car and drove on. A sign on the side of the road said the next town was twenty miles away and proclaimed itself the home of the best cheeseburger for five hundred miles. I’ll stop at the next town Grace thought to herself as she drove.

As she turned a bend in the road she say movement in the trees ahead. Something black flashed between two trunks and then disappeared from view. She moved the car into the centre of the empty road, ready to swerve away if it was another one of those metal mouthed creeps.

Something dashed out of the woods and stood in the middle of the road waving its arms. It was Tom completely naked and streaked with either mud, blood or a combination of the two. She slowed the car beside him and he jumped in.

“I’m glad it was you,” he said grinning at her.

Grace didn’t know wether to slap him or kiss him as relief washed over her. Tom reached back and grabbed a blanket off the back seat and wrapped it around his body.

“Did any of them bite you?” She asked fearing the worst.

“I fought them off before they had a chance,” he said sounding tired.

“Was that really you back there? The bear? Was that you Tom?” she asked.

“You saw me?” he said and continued, “I had to transform, it took a lot out of me after the injury from yesterday.” His eyes began to droop and he looked at her sleepily. “I need food fast, get me to a diner and wake me up when we are there,” he said and drifted off to sleep.

Grace drove on and kept reflexively checking the rear view mirror whenever she saw a flicker of movement. She expected to see men with snapping teeth watching her from the road side as they drove, she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched and she squirmed in the car seat thinking about it.

Thirty minutes later she pulled into the empty car lot beside S. Flotts diner. She looked at Tom sleeping, his chest rising and falling as his eye lids fluttered. He looked so peaceful and not at all like the roaring beast she had seen as she sped away from the cabin. How could the soul of a bear live entwined with that of a man she wondered. She leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek, his skin burning hot under her lips as if he was running a fever. His eyes flickered open and he turned to her smiling.

“That’s a sight I could get used to waking up beside,” he said reaching up and stroking Graces cheek.

Grace leaned in and they kissed deeply and even though she felt like she had been running on fear for the last hour she could still feel a spread of pleasure between her legs as he held her and they kissed.

They separated and she pressed her hand to his forehead and said, “You’re burning up.”

“It’s a side effect of the transformation. I’ll have a high temperature for a few hours, a ravenous appetite, and some pains in my joints,” Tom said.

Grace passed him a bundle of clothes, a small towel and a bottle of water. “I stopped at a garage sale and picked these up for you. I hope they’re your size. You can use this to wash off the worst of the blood before you change,” she said pointing to the bottled water and the pink fluffy towel.

“You think of everything,” he said. “Pull the car around the back and I’ll scrub off back there.”

He jumped out of the car and put the bundle of clothes on the car roof. He slung the blanket around his shoulders and opened the bottle of water. Grace knew she shouldn’t be looking but couldn’t take her eyes off his naked form. The way the muscles moved like banded steel under his skin, his biceps flexing as he poured the water over his chest and scrubbed with the blanket. As he washed himself off he never took his eyes off Grace, a smile curling the corners of her lips. With most of the blood cleaned off he dried himself off with the towel and balled both up and threw them across to an open dumpster. He walked over to the car his hips at Graces eye level and she felt a warm flush between her legs as his cock hung before her. He pulled on the clothes and cheap trainers she had bought him and jumped back in the car.

“Did you like what you saw?” he said in a teasing voice.

Grace could feel her cheeks prickle and burn as she said yes.

“Not exactly my style,” Tom said pulling the T-shirt forward to try to read the logo. The T-shirt was a deep maroon with a fading decal of a bar in the middle of a grey and depressing looking strip mall.

“It says Brants bar,grill and pool hall. Fun guaranteed,” Grace said.

“Add it to the itinerary,” he said smiling. “Can we get some food? My body is crying out for it.”

Grace could feel the waves of heat coming off him. It was like she was sitting next to a brick oven, a slow steady and continual heat that prickled the skin when you got too close to it. She put her hand on his bare arm as the heat emanated from him. “Are we safe?” she asked.

He looked her dead in the eyes and said, “We wont be safe until we cross the border into Canada. They wont follow us up there.”

The diner had white painted walls and leather booths running across the back wall. It was too early for the lunch time crowd so the place was empty. A woman in her twenties with tired eyes looked up from her paperback when Grace and Tom entered.
 

“Can I get you folks coffee while deciding on what to order?” She asked.

“Sounds perfect,” Tom said and chose a booth with a clear view of the entrance and exit. The window on the other side of the diner faced onto the car park and currently the only other car parked there was theirs.

The waitress came down and poured them both coffee and said, “I’ll give you folks a minute if you want.”

“I’m ready to order now” he said sliding the menu back into the metal holder. “I’ll take ten of your famous cheeseburgers and a large malted shake. Fries with them all,” he said.

The waitress turned to Grace and arched her eyebrow and said, “Is your friend messing with me?”

Grace looked up at the waitress and smiled. “He’s dead serious. I’ll have a cheeseburger and a malt too.”

The waitress looked back and forth between them seemingly trying to decide if this was some sort of elaborate stunt and then nodded and walked to the kitchen.

Tom held up his hand and it was trembling. “That transformation really took it out of me.”

“What happens if you don’t eat,” Grace said sounding concerned.

“Have you ever seen those nature documentaries about the bear during winter?” Grace nodded yes. “I go into a kind of deep hibernation. I start to get sluggish and my body starts to shut down. Eventually if I wait long enough I’ll curl up into a ball somewhere.”

“What happens then?” Grace asked.

“If a clan member can get to me they set up an intravenous feeding tube into my arm. After being on that for a couple of hours that is usually enough to wake the person enough so that they can be fed solid foods.”

“What happens if you don’t get the feeding tube?” Grace said.

Tom wrapped his arms around his body and Grace could see the colour rapidly leaving his skin. Where once a raging furnace blasted from him she could now feel nothing emanating from him.

“There are stories in my clan about people going into hibernation for years and then being woken up. The person wakes up completely unchanged and un-aged,” he said taking a sip of his coffee.

“How long did these people sleep for?” Grace said.

“One of our stories tells of a whole family that hibernated deep in a forest in Russia. The story goes that they had been hibernating for nearly a hundred years when a scout for a logging company fell through a tangle of roots into a large hollowed out area under the tree. He landed amidst the sleeping bodies of the family, a mother, father and four young children. They all lay in the dirt curled up together in a single mass. The clothes they had lay down in where rotted and falling apart from decades of being underground. The scout landed with a thud only feet away from the hibernating family. The knees of his trousers where ripped wide open and blood seeped from the gouges the pointy roots had caused as he fell. The cave the scout had fallen into was pitch dark with a beam of light slanting down from above and illuminating where he fell. He sat there for a minute the wind knocked out of him as he flexed his knee to check how bad the damage was. The scout could hear something from the far corner a sound like rustling leaves. The lamp on his hardhat had gone off in the fall and he smacked his helmet to switch it back on,” Tom said and then paused as the waitress arrived with a large tray.