Burden to Bear (6 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

            Half an hour earlier, Douglas was leaving the university library when he spied Sarah and Wilson sitting together in the cafe.

“Oh good,” he thought at first.  “She’s breaking up with him.”  He typically was not a voyeur, but he was unable to stop himself.  His future happiness depended on this success of this break-up.

He gasped in disbelief as he saw Sarah lean forward to kiss Wilson.  His heart dropped as she embraced him again and again. 

He felt betrayed.  “She wasn’t really into me, after all,” he told himself. “She only had sex with me because she felt sorry for me.” 

He was about to walk away dejectedly, when he noticed Wilson push Sarah back into her chair.  Sarah laughed raucously.  He grew concerned when he saw Sarah get up out of her chair and almost fall to the floor.

Sarah was not a big drinker, and she certainly was not drunk.

“He’s put some sort of spell on her!” Douglas exclaimed to himself.  He felt sick.  “That can only mean that he is going to feed on her now.”

He took a step forward, ready to confront Wilson right there in the café, but succumbed to his better judgment.  He knew that, provoked, he would most likely shift to his were-bear form.  He could not risk shifting in the university café, not while it was filled with at least fifty students.  He had sworn as a young cub that he would protect the secret existence of shifters everywhere.  Additionally, he was concerned about the safety of his fellow students if there was an all-out supernatural brawl taking place in the cafe. 

He followed Sarah and Wilson at a careful distance.  He became frantic when Wilson guided Sarah outside to the yellow car parked illegally on the curb.  “Damn!” he cursed silently.  He crept out through another doorway and hailed a cab.

“Follow that yellow car,” he instructed the driver.  “I don’t care how fast you have to go.”

When the driver hesitated, he shouted, “I’ll pay you $100 over whatever the fare is!”

The driver shouted an affirmation in a foreign language and quickly moved into action.  The cab was not very fast. It was actually pretty beat up and rattled every time the driver pressed his foot on the gas pedal.  Douglas was relieved that two points were in his favor.  First, there was a popular art festival taking place in the city that day, and the street were packed.  Wilson was having a hard time weaving through the traffic.  At this rate, it would take him an hour to go ten blocks.  Secondly, Wilson’s car was such a ridiculous bright yellow, that Douglas could find it even a half mile away.

Wilson slowly and carefully drove the Ferrari through the crawling traffic, and eventually made his way to the old part of the city.  The activity on the streets lessened, and Douglas instructed the cab driver to follow at a further distance.  Wilson pulled his car to the curb on a quiet street in front of the large condo building where Sarah had visited him the previous day.  Douglas instructed the driver to stop a block or so before they reached the building.  He stood on the sidewalk and watched Wilson drag Sarah into his building.  Again, he felt compelled to fight the predator and save Sarah, but knew that he would deeply regret shifting to a were-bear on a city street.

“He must be desperate to feed,” Douglas mused.  “I’ve never seen someone so brazen with their prey in broad daylight.”

Once Wilson had disappeared into the building, Douglas quickly crept up to the door.  The door locked form the outside.  He’d have to break in. 

He looked upwards.  He noticed that each condo in the building had a large balcony.  Since the street was basically dead this time of day, he decided to take a gamble and just climb the balconies until he found Wilson and Sarah.  No one would notice, most likely.  “This creature’s odor is so putrid,” he told himself, “I’ll know for sure which condo is his pretty quickly.”

He climbed from balcony to balcony, leaping and pulling himself up.  The veins in his biceps popped from the exertion. 

On the seventh floor, he stopped.  This had to be the place.  The reptilian smell was overwhelming.  He stifled a sneeze.

He crawled over to the balcony door and peered through.  He was right.  Sarah’s unconscious body had been tossed, face up, across the bed.  Wilson was at the other end of the room, his back to Douglas.  Wilson was undressing.

Douglas ducked when Wilson turned to face the balcony doors.  Wilson was still in a human form, but in all other respects, he had changed completely.  His skin had darkened to a bluish-gray.  He was scaly.  He had no genitalia. 

Douglas gulped.  He realized that this was no supernatural creature.  This was, in fact, a demon.  He watched as the naked fiend slipped slowly across the room towards Sarah, hissing.  It climbed onto the bed and straddled her.  It removed her blouse, and then, quickly, before Douglas realized what was happening, emitted long snake fangs and inserted them into the flesh over Sarah’s heart.

Douglas crouched there.  He was crippled with fear over the petrifying scene before him.  While he and his grandfather had discussed the possibility of snake demons, his mind was having difficulties accepting the reality of one just a few feet away from him. 

But anger overtook his feelings of fear.  The rage crept over him fast and faster, like red-hot blood pumping through his veins.  How dare this creature hurt the woman he loved!  He felt the muscles and bones in his body swell and crunch beneath his skin.  Tufts of hair appeared all over his body, and enormous carnivorous teeth protruded from his gums.

He roared in fury and smashed through the glass of the balcony door.  The snake demon’s eyes widened as he saw the furious beast lunging toward him.  It pulled its fangs from Sarah’s body and coiled to strike Douglas.

Douglas slashed the demon with his long claws, and then impaled the snake on one of them.  He drew Wilson towards him, snarling.  The demon’s scaly body shuddered, and he cried out in agony.

Douglas extracted his claw from the demon’s body, then held it in his paws.  He grinned savagely, drool dripping from his huge teeth as the demon writhed in dismay.  Then, with little effort, Douglas ripped the snake demon completely in half, from head to legs.  A shimmering pink pastel liquid poured to the floor.  Douglas snorted in disgust.  The demon did not even bleed like a living creature.  It was an abomination.

Wilson had been drinking Sarah’s lifeforce, not her blood.  Unlike most evil supernatural predators, who drank human blood or ate human flesh in order to sustain their magic abilities, the snake demon actually lived off the souls of humans.  His kind were the most dangerous of all mystical beings. 

Douglas lumbered over to the bed in his were-bear form and studied Sarah.  He shook her as gently as he could with one paw.  She groaned and peered at him with blood-shot eyes.  Douglas could tell that she had been seriously harmed.  He rebuked himself for not crashing through that door and stopping the snake demon earlier. 

He would have to wait until he was able to shift back to human form before he could attend to her.  Somehow, despite the crazed trepidation he was feeling over the welfare of the woman he loved, he had to calm himself down, so that he could shift back.  There was no way he could exit this building until he appeared normal again.

He trudged through the condominium, routing through cabinets and knocking down dishes.  Before it struck, he detected a whiff of another snake creature.

He leaped into the air, just missing the sharp fangs of another snake demon in his back. Wilson must have been living with a friend.

Wilson’s friend struck his fangs into a wooden bookcase instead.  He wriggled desperately, trying to extract himself.  Douglas crept behind him and grabbed both his legs.  The snake demon hissed savagely but was still unable to free himself.

Douglas jerked the demon’s legs in opposite directions, and tore the creature to pieces.  Snarling, he quickly backed away from the glistening gray puddle of demon juices that gathered on the floor.  This snake demon was much older than the other.  Possibly it was an ancestor of the other.  He gagged.  The odor from this one was abhorrent.

After carefully checking the remainder of the rooms for any more snake demons, he resumed his search for Wilson’s liquor stash.  He found it in one of the kitchen cabinets.  Wilson had been such a snob, it appeared he had only drank wine.  Wine was not Douglas’ favorite, but for the purposes of relaxing his body to unshift from were-bear form, it would suffice.

His first attempt to open a bottle was a disaster.  There was no way he could pull out a corkscrew with clumsy paws and long claws.  He decided to do this the lazy way. He pushed the stopper into the bottom of the kitchen sink and lodged it in as far as it would go.  Then he smashed all the bottles of wine into the sink, shoved away all the glass he could, and lapped up as the remaining wine.

When he finished licking up every drop of wine, he felt slightly buzzed.  He crashed onto Wilson’s couch in the living room.  A few minutes later, he felt his limbs shrinking and his skin tightening.

Tufts of hair and immense bloody teeth were scattered on the floor around him.  He ran to the bathroom and peered into the mirror.  He was back in his human form.

He raced to Sarah and crouched over her. She was very pale, and her breathing was shallow.  She needed help immediately.

He grabbed a pair of workout shorts and a t-shirt from Wilson’s top dresser drawer.  They were too small, but it was better he was clothed, no matter how ridiculously, than have someone see him strut outdoors naked carrying an unconscious woman.  He foraged around the far end of the room until he found Wilson’s pants.  He delved into the pockets and removed the Ferrari keys.

He easily hoisted Sarah in his arms and went to the hallway.  Thankfully, no one was about.  He went to the back stairway and jogged down it, cradling Sarah carefully in his arms.

Once outside, he quickly sidled to the front of the building and unlocked Wilson’s car with the key fob.   Then he positioned Sarah upright in the passenger’s side of Wilson’s car, cursing the fact that the tiny Ferrari had no back seat.  He jumped inside and quickly drove away.

CHAPTER 9

Douglas left the city behind and drove at top speed for the country.  His grandfather lived on a small estate, about two hours from the university.  Grandfather had a few tenants on his estate, and one of them was a healer.  Douglas hoped with all his heart that the healer could help Sarah.

From time to time, he could hear Sarah moaning in the back seat.  Once she even called his name.  His heart warmed that she remembered him even in her critical condition.  He pressed his foot on the gas even harder.

Finally, in the early afternoon, he reached his grandfather’s estate.  At the gate, he yelled into the intercom, “Grandfather, come help me!  Sarah’s been hurt.”

He was quickly emitted through the gate, and when he pulled the Ferrari up at the big house, his grandfather was already waiting outside to assist.

Grandfather was in his early eighties, but still a very strong and agile man.  Like Douglas, he was tall, gargantuan, and hairy.  He jerked open the car door as soon as Douglas braked to a stop, and lifted Sarah easily. 

“The healer is waiting,” he explained as he immediately made his way to one of the cottages nearby.

Douglas jogged behind him.

The healer was already preparing a cot for Sarah when they walked in.

“Welcome,” she said as Douglas and Grandfather entered.  “Please lay her on this cot.”

Grandfather laid Sarah down gently, and the healer began to arrange herbs and flowers around Sarah’s unconscious body.

Douglas observed her.  She was a tall, thin, older woman with long gray hair.  She wore an old-fashioned dress of some sort of floral print.  He could not detect anything supernatural about his woman.  Did she have the power to heal Sarah?  She looked like someone’s crazy old aunt.

He looked up at his grandfather questioningly.  Grandfather nodded reassuringly and put a finger to his lips. 

The healer hummed a gentle folk melody and examined the punctures on Sarah’s chest where Wilson’s fangs had entered her.

“It did this quickly,” she murmured.  “Usually, they are more careful than this.”

She strode over to a counter and pulled a few jars from a cabinet above it.  She turned to Douglas, her wrinkled face serene.  “Describe the creature that fed from her.”

Douglas gulped.  “Reptilian.  I think it was a snake demon.  But it was not a shifter, so it never shifted.  It used magic to put her under this spell. It even smelled like dark magic. It carried her to its home, pushed out some fangs, and started to feed from her.”

He suddenly remembered the ghastly sticky liquid inside the demons.  “Oh, yes.  It had no real blood.  Just some shiny pink liquid.  I think it was drinking her life force.”

The healer nodded. 

Douglas added.  “There were two of them.  One was old, I think.  When I killed it, its blood was gray.”

The healer grabbed an old book from under the counter.  She shoved it at Grandfather.  While Grandfather was paging through it, she took herbs from various jars and ground them with a mortar.  Then she added a few spoonfuls of black paste from another jar.  She mixed these together.  Then she carefully applied the concoction to the puncture wounds on Sarah’s chest. 

“Ah- ha!” Grandfather exclaimed.  The healer and Douglas walked over to where he was seated and looked at the page where he was pointing.  There was a drawing of two snake demons.  They looked just like Wilson and that other creature who had been living with him. 

Grandfather started reading.  “Snake demons choose to live in pairs.  An older snake demon will choose a younger snake demon to be its mate.  The younger snake demon hunts for human prey, brings it back to the lair, and copulates with it.  Then the two feed on the life force from the human.  The human then dies,” he finished solemnly.

“You stopped him just in time,” the healer said to Douglas.  “Did it copulate with her?”

“No!” shouted Douglas. 

The healer looked at him in amusement.  “He must have known you would try to stop him.  He didn’t follow their normal rituals.  That’s another reason she is still alive.  Usually, they both feed together, after the younger has copulated.  Then the two demons copulate.”

Douglas shivered.  “You mean those two things were mates?  Yuck!”

“You’re lucky you are alive, too,” said the healer.  “They are pretty powerful beings.”

The healer had Douglas and Grandfather lift Sarah so that she could bandage Sarah’s chest.  When she was finished, she washed her hands thoroughly.

Douglas was standing over Sarah’s cot, frantically willing her to heal.  The healer walked over to him, took his hands and stared disconcertingly into his eyes.  He flushed, but did not stop her.

“Do you love her?” the healer asked.

Douglas inhaled deeply.  “With all my heart,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes. “Is she going to die?” he asked, hesitatingly.

“No,” the healer said simply.  “You saved her life.”

“No?” Douglas could not believe that he had heard correctly.

“She will not die,” the healer said.  “I know it sounds like an old fairy story, but the only real cure for depleted life force is true love.  If you truly love her, she will grow strong again and live.”

The healer covered Sarah with an old crocheted blanket and motioned for both Douglas and his grandfather to follow her outside onto the porch.  “Sit,” she ordered, and poured a glass of iced herbal tea for both of them.

Douglas accepted the tea and sat gratefully on one of the old wooden benches on the healer’s porch.  The last few hours had sucked away his energy.  The healer explained that Sarah would have to stay in her cottage for the next few days until the spell wore off.  Then she would need to rest for a few weeks in the big house.

“I’ll have my housekeeper get a room ready for them both,” Grandfather said, nodding towards Douglas.  “I’ll expect you’ll want to stay here with her?”

Douglas nodded.  He thought quickly.  “We’ll have to take a leave of absence from university.  And I’ll have to go back and grab some clothes and stuff from our apartments.”

“Cats,” he suddenly remembered.  “She has two cats.  We’ll have to bring them here.”

Grandfather grimaced.  Cats and supernatural beings never got along very well, no matter whether the supernatural being was good or evil.

The healer spoke up.  “I’ll take care of the cats.  I know how you were-bears can be about felines.”  She chuckled.

Grandfather looked relieved.  “Douglas, you get some rest for now.  I’ll get rid of that Ferrari, which I’m assuming belonged to the snake demon?”

Douglas nodded.

“You can go back to the city later this evening,” Grandfather said.  “You can take my truck.”

***

Douglas sat in a chair by Sarah’s cot for the next two days, holding her hand, never leaving her side, except for his quick trip back to the city.  He made the trip as brief as he could, throwing together some clothes for the both of them and crating Chum-Chum and Noodle safely in the back of the truck.

The cats instantly attached to the healer, and followed her around from room to room, meowing in adoration.  The healer was pleased with their attention.

Douglas talked to Sarah frequently, although she did not respond back. The healer told him that talking was a good way to keep her bound to this world.  As long as she was listening to him speak, even in her unconscious state, she would remain bound to this world, and refrain from slipping into the next.

Occasionally, Sarah called out to him, but when he answered, he knew she did not really see or hear him, although she was staring at him intently.

Finally, on the evening of the second day, Sarah opened her eyes and called for him, and when he answered her, she spoke intelligently. “Where are we?” she asked.

“We are staying with a friend of my grandfather, on my grandfather’s estate,” he explained.

She smiled slightly.  Sarah had been visited the estate a few times in her childhood.

Then she frowned.  “What’s wrong?” asked Douglas.

“You were a bear,” Sarah mumbled. 

Douglas panicked.  She remembered.  He had hoped and prayed that Sarah had been too drugged by Wilson’s magic to remember what he looked like in his shifted form.  He had hoped they could go back to living just like they had before, except of course this time they would be lovers, not best friends.

Even in her weakened mental state, Sarah recognized his anxiety.  She grinned at him affectionately.

“You saved me,” she said simply.

Douglas wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tightly.  Sarah murmured something unintelligible.

“What’s that?” he asked, releasing her.

“Don’t squash me with your big bear arms,” she repeated jokingly.

For the moment, Douglas’ anxiety about his secret identity vanished.  Sarah knew what he was, and she was okay with it.  Perhaps everything would work out okay. 

*

A few days later, Sarah was able to walk around, with his help, and she moved over to a room at the big house.  She insisted, however, that he stay with her almost constantly.  Grandfather, despite his conservative notions about unmarried couples sharing living arrangements, agreed that this was a special circumstance.  Both Grandfather and Douglas knew that Sarah would be nervous about being alone for some time to come, given the supernatural events that she had witnessed. 

A few nights later, while they were cuddled in bed together, Sarah began to ask questions.

“Douglas, you were a bear,” she said.

Douglas nodded.

“I wasn’t imagining it?”

Douglas shook his head. 

“And Wilson, was he a vampire or something?” Sarah asked.

“No,” Douglas replied.  “He wasn’t drinking your blood.”

“What did he do to me?”

“He was a reptilian predator, like a snake.  He was feeding from your life force – your soul.”

Sarah thought about this for a few minutes. “He wanted to kill me?” she asked.

“Well, you would have died if he had finished,” Douglas said. 

“Do you eat souls, too?” Sarah asked.

Douglas chucked.  “No, never!” he said.  “Wilson was a demon. He was evil.”

“Wilson didn’t look like a snake or a demon,” Sarah observed.

Douglas agreed.  “No, he wasn’t a shifter.  He used snake magic to charm you into getting you to like him, and he smelled to hell like a reptile, but he never took the reptile form.  In fact, even in his demon form, he looked more human than most supernatural creatures.”

Sarah looked puzzled.  “But you looked like a bear.”

Douglas sighed.  “Yes.  I am a shifter.  I don’t prey on humans.  My supernatural abilities just involve shifting into a bear sometimes.  I’m really quite harmless – except maybe to rabbits,” he added with a smile.  He looked at Sarah from the corner of his eye, hoping she thought it was funny, too.

Sarah whispered into his ear.  “I never once thought you could hurt me, Douglas.  I know that you love me.  I love you, too.” She kissed him tenderly.  He kissed her back, slipping his tongue between her lips.  She enjoyed it for a moment, then abandoned the kiss to ask more questions.

“Is Grandfather a bear, too?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Was your father a bear?”

“Yes.”

“What about your mother?”

Douglas squirmed a little uncomfortably.  “She was human.”

Sarah pondered that for a bit. 

“You always said she died giving birth to you,” she said.  “Is that true?”

“Yes,” Douglas replied.

“Did she die because of the bear thing?” she asked.  “Because you’re half bear.”  She hesitated asking the question because Douglas had always been touchy about the subject of his mother’s death, but she wanted to clarify Douglas’ background once and for all.

Douglas nodded.  “Sometimes human women have really rough pregnancies carrying a were-bear child,” he said.  “My mother didn’t make it.” 

“I’m so sorry,” Sarah said. “So you call yourselves “were-bears”?” she asked.

Douglas nodded.

Sarah climbed on top of him and kissed his nose.

“I’m okay with all this,” she said simply.  “It’s all really weird, but I’m okay with it.”

Douglas was wary.  “Most humans don’t accept our realm this readily,” he said. 

“I think I’m okay,” Sarah repeated.  “As long as you and Grandfather don’t try to eat me.” She was not being serious.  That irked Douglas a little.

“You need to seriously consider the fact that if one day we wanted to have kids, it could possibly kill you,” Douglas said.  “And you have to consider that one day your children will change into were-bears.  Don’t jump into this the way you jump into every relationship.  Think about it first.”

He rolled to the far end of the bed. 

“Shhhh,” Sarah quieted him, holding her finger over his lips.  “Douglas, for once I am with a man who is good and kind and hardworking.  And it’s you.  Isn’t this what you wanted?”