Taming the Bear Collection (19 page)

      
As she picked up the gun and gripped it she put her back to the tree, preparing to spin out and open fire. Just as she began to pivot her foot a loud boom filled her ears and shook the tree she was leaning against, startling her in the process. Rain screeched and caught her foot on the ground, falling to her knees beside the tree.

      
She looked up to see a massive fire raging in the clearing with several burning bodies inside of it. A few more wolves were lying in the clearing, none of them moving. Each of them looked more like a broken heap of fur than a body; the explosion had done its job and done it well.

      
Beorn was rolling backwards towards his gun, preparing to open fire. It didn’t look like there were any wolves left to shoot, though. The entire hunting party had been decimated by Beorn’s bombs.

      
Rain stepped out, gun at her side, as she watched the carnage and horror that had unfolded before her eyes. Her legs began to feel weak and she almost collapsed to her knees as the flames shot up into the sky, beginning to catch some of the trees as well.

      
“The whole forest is going to burn,” she muttered. “They’re all dead.”

      
The whole scene felt like a movie. She was there watching it, but she didn’t feel involved. The birds had stopped chirping, the trees had stopped moving and the only sound was the crackle of the roaring fire that threatened to consume the entire forest.

      
A piercing gunshot brought her back to reality. Her hands immediately went up to cover her highly sensitive ears as another gunshot boomed through the forest. Her eyes finally focused on the situation at hand. Several more wolves, ones who hadn’t been involved in the hunting party, were exiting the bushes to assess the situation. Beorn had shot two of them already. One he immediately killed with a well-placed shot to the head and another he clipped just behind the shoulder blade, bringing it to the ground.

      
“Dammit, Rain, pay attention!” Beorn screamed. It was at that moment she realized he had been screaming at her for some time. “Shoot! Shoot!”

      
Rain lifted the gun in front of her face, gripping it tightly with two hands. She’d never fired one before and now he was asking her to use it to take another life. Earlier she had felt confident that she would be able to do it when asked. She’d had no problem crushing her jaws down onto Eden and she would have finished her enemy if need be, but it just felt so wrong with a gun. She was a wolf, not a man, and she didn’t need man’s destructive weaponry.

      
Wasn’t it Beorn who had told her to find her inner wolf and ignore the conveniences of man’s life? So why was he begging her to use a weapon designed by man to obtain dominion over the world around him?

      
“This isn’t the time to get cold feet!” Beorn shouted as another of his bullets ripped through the flesh of an approaching wolf, bringing it to the ground. They were getting closer now, three of them almost out of the clearing around the cabin and into the underbrush where Rain and Beorn were camped.

      
Rain looked into the eyes of an oncoming brown wolf as he fixed his deadly gaze on her. There were bad intentions in his eyes; he meant to kill her and nobody else.

      
Kill or be killed.
That was the only thought that played through her mind.

      
The oncoming wolf left the ground, flying through the air with ease as he headed straight for her face. The world went silent again; the only thing Rain could hear was her own screaming as she pulled the trigger repeatedly. Her ears began to ring from the explosion of the bullets leaving the chamber.

      
Blood sprayed through the air, creating a macabre painting in mid-air with the fire as a backdrop. And just as quickly as it had begun, the wolf was on the ground, another breath never to leave its body.

      
She was shaking as she held the gun in her hands. She had killed one of the other wolves, and she had used a gun to do it. With a scream she dropped the gun and jumped back, slamming into the tree she had used earlier to hide behind. Her eyes scanned the scene, trying to make out what was happening in front of her.

      
There was another wolf lying beside Beorn’s gun, its breathing shallow and rapid. The fire glinted off steel revealing to Rain the large hunting knife jutting out of the wolf’s throat. Meanwhile Beorn was on his back, another large brown wolf pinning him to the ground. Her mate was doing everything he could to keep the creature from tearing him apart. He had his forearm shoved into the wolf’s throat and his other hand holding the wolf’s mouth shut as he tried to push him off. She could see the veins throbbing in his forearms and hands as his strength began to falter. The wolf was going to break free and bite into his exposed neck.

      
Rain snapped out of her war fog and quickly sprang into action, pulling the knife from the other wolf’s throat and bringing it down on the base of Beorn’s attacker’s skull. He whimpered and then gurgled before slumping off of Beorn, the light leaving his eyes as he did so.

      
“Are you okay?” she asked.

      
“I’m good,” Beorn said, looking at the large scratches down his arms. “Thanks for finally joining the party.”

      
“You knew I’d get there eventually,” she said, looking around. Her eyes settled on something across the clearing, something terrifying. “Who do you think he is?”

      
Beorn stood up and looked at the silver behemoth who stood on the other side of the fire. His black eyes still burned into them. The fire didn’t seem to faze the monster at all; he stood silently watching with the flames dancing right up to his fur.

      
“I don’t know,” Beorn said, picking his gun up. Deliberately he brought it to his shoulder and aimed at the beast. If the silver alpha was frightened by the action, he didn’t show it. Instead, he backed into the woods, the expression on his face and in his cold, dead eyes not changing the entire time.

      
“I think we need to go,” Rain said, feeling very uncomfortable as he vanished from sight.

      
“I’m not going to disagree with you,” Beorn said, slinging the rifle over one shoulder. “Pick up your gun. Let’s get to the truck now.”

      
Rain walked over and stopped, staring down at the tiny instrument that had caused so much death and destruction. When she’d woken up this morning she hadn’t expected the day to go this way. Violence was always the elephant in the room when you were a werewolf. Even civilized meetings carried the ability to easily devolve into a violent pissing match. But that was the old days, before the packs had moved to Bucklin and established a human life. Rain had been trained to fight, but she wasn’t conditioned for this kind of wholesale devastation. Her entire frame of reference had come from television and movies, not from dealing death herself.

      
It was so easy for her surrogate father, Rowan, to end another life; he was older and had been through violence. He was closer to the old ways than she would ever be. This wasn’t fun; it bothered her in a way she couldn’t even describe. Things would never be the same for her. She’d taken the most precious gift from another.

      
Her wolf was growling its approval, satisfied that she had punished those who would seek to harm her mate, pack or territory. But she wasn’t an animal, and as Beorn had said, there had to be a balance. The balance just wasn’t there right now; she was too torn between the strong feelings of regret and guilt from her human side and the strong feelings of satisfaction from her wolf.

      
As she picked up the gun she almost fell forward, her head suddenly feeling light and the world spinning. Just as quickly as the feeling hit her she managed to calm it and stand upright. She looked over at Beorn, who didn’t seem to have noticed.

      
“Are you ready?” he asked solemnly. He seemed to know something was wrong, but he was in full-on survival mode at the moment.

      
“Yes,” she said, fighting back tears. “Let’s go.”

      
She’s really upset,
Beorn thought as they beat their way through the dense underbrush of the forest. He’d made it a point to avoid any paths that he had cut through the trees, expecting to find more of the Oakdale pack lying in wait for an ambush.

      
Beorn could tell the guns and killing had bothered Rain, but he couldn’t stop to comfort her right now. If they hadn’t done what they did, then they could both be dead right now. They had saved their own lives.

      
She’s grown a lot,
Beorn thought, looking over at Rain. When they first met she’d described herself as petulant and immature and the stuff she said had revealed that to him. For all he knew, in her day-to-day dealings she was still immature and childish, but right now she was stepping up to the plate and acting much more mature. Being in mortal danger for the better part of a day usually forced one to grow up before they were ready. But it was no accident that she had handled the danger so well. Rowan might not have coached her well in her day-to-day dealings, but he had definitely taught her how to survive.

      
“We should be getting close to my truck,” Beorn said.

      
“Okay,” Rain choked out. “Then what are we going to do?”

      
“I’ll call Thorn on the way,” Beorn said. “He’ll meet us in town.”

      
“What about Rowan? Call Rowan too.”

      
“I’ll call Rowan too. Hopefully…never mind.”

      
“What were you going to say?” Rain looked at him, a desperate plea in her eyes.

      
“Nothing,” Beorn said, trying not to make eye contact. “It’s just not important.”

      
“Say it.”

      
“I was going to say hopefully Leena hasn’t turned on him. Hopefully he can answer the phone.”

      
Rain’s bottom lip began to quiver, but she bit down on it hard enough to draw blood as she froze in place.

      
“Hey, now,” Beorn said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “We don’t know what’s happening out there.”

      
“It’s just so hard,” Rain said, tears starting to roll down her cheeks. “I have no idea if my friends and family are alive or dead. We almost died today and we’ve killed so many wolves that I used to see every day. The wolf I shot, that was Mr. Sauthers, who owned the candy store when I was a kid.”

      
Beorn felt pain and guilt washing through his body. The wolves of Bucklin, save for a select few, were nothing to him. It made no difference to his bear if they lived or died; they were threatening his well-being. But for Rain, it was a totally different situation: they were her pack mates. The wolves of Bucklin could call themselves five packs and deny any kinship, but in the end they were all members of the Bucklin pack and now she had to kill people she had always been around.

      
“He wasn’t the same man,” Beorn said, trying to calm her. “He’d changed.”

      
“What if he was under some spell?” she said, looking back up at Beorn, blood running down her chin. “Leena told us her life was like being forced to watch with no control. Like she was captive in the backseat while someone else drove her car.”

      
“But she was lying,” Beorn said. “We know that now.”

      
“What if that’s what it was like for the other wolves, though? What if Forrest died helpless, watching while your paw came down to destroy his body? He might have been screaming at us from inside, telling us that he was still in there.”

      
“You can’t think about that stuff right now,” Beorn said. “If you start thinking like that, then everyone dies. Rowan, Aster, Eva, Hawk, Ciara, Thorn—they all die.”

      
Rain sniffed again and looked back up at him. Her eyes twinkled as she stared into his, but he didn’t break eye contact. Beorn’s long tongue darted out of his mouth, leaving a trail from her chin to her lips as he licked up the blood from her bottom lip. When he made it to her pouty, soft lips his tongue parted them as he pulled her in for a kiss. She didn’t reach up to grab him; instead, she remained limp in his arms, letting him have his way with her mouth. Beorn pulled away after several seconds, looking into her eyes. They smoldered with desire and worry, all mixed into one bowl of emotion.

      
“Don’t you fret, lovely,” he said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to us.”

      
“I know you won’t,” she said, looking at the ground.

      
“Let’s go,” he said, spinning around and marching onward. “We should get decent cell signal when we make it back to my truck.”

      
Beorn felt something stab into his heart, something that made his stomach flutter. Was this heartache? Had he ever experienced it before? He didn’t like it, but it was present. He had given Rain the most loving, passionate kiss he could muster in these circumstances and she hadn’t returned it. Immediately his mind turned from the task at hand and began to wander through the recesses of his past relationships. Had he screwed this one up like he had most of the others? Usually his gruffness and intense desire to always be right had sent relationships spiraling out of control, but this was different. He’d been loving, he’d been understanding, and he’d tried everything to make her comfortable.

      
It had to be from the violence. Was she just upset from it in general or upset at his cavalier attitude towards war and battle?