The Bear Truth (7 page)

“Tell me where Joshua is,” I said as I advanced on him. I deliberately let my snout and fingernails grow longer as I approached him. Still, he didn’t look afraid. I wasn’t sure what to think about that. “Tell me where he is, or I will feed you to the wolves.” Now that was a threat that I probably could deliver on. Bears, wolves, lions, leopards, they were all there at the Summit. All I had to do was tell them that this man responsible for Markus’s murder, and they would take care of the rest. It was the way of the animal kingdom. We took care of our own.

“You’re too late,” Craig said. “No matter what you know, we’re already two steps ahead of you. You think you know the truth, but you don’t. Even those who are like you hate you.”

The venom in his voice would take most normal men aback. Instead, it just made me angrier. Now, we were just a foot apart. I grabbed him by the throat. My bear wanted to rip it out. Then I felt the calming presence of Maren behind me. She gently pushed me out of the way. She looked at Craig.

“If were too late, then it doesn’t matter if you tell us what you know,” she said. “I’m a reporter for the Greyelf Gazette. If you tell me what you did, I’ll make sure that you get credit for it. Not the one who organized it, but you.”

I didn’t think that Craig would really want to see his name printed as the culprit, but then I saw his eyes light up. Somehow, Maren had known that it wasn’t my threats that were going to make Craig talk. Whoever was the true mastermind behind the plan was probably keeping him in the dark.

You’ll put my name right up there? With his?”

“Oh, yes,” Maren said with a smile. “In fact, I’ll put your name first if you want. Just tell us.”

The words tumbled out of Craig’s mouth. “They’re already there. They’re already at the Summit. We wired the place weeks ago. We did it soon as they told us where the location was.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “We’ve had security around the location for weeks.”

That’s when a slow smile spread across the Craig’s face. I realized a glaring, yet obvious truth that made things start to fall into place. I stepped backward. Maren looked at me with a question on her face, but I just shook my head. “We need to go. We need to go
now
.”

Lukas wouldn’t tell me what was going on yet. We rode silently in the truck, and he seemed to be trying to make it go as fast as possible. I had no idea where the Summit was being held. It was a secret location, and the media was definitely not invited. I could tell that Lukas was worried.

“I wonder if we just delayed the inevitable by starting later. Actually, that might have saved everything,” he murmured. I wasn’t sure if he even realized that he had spoken out loud.

“What you think is going on?" I asked. Lukas’s mind was going a million miles a minute. I could tell because I’d seen that look before on his face many times. But I needed him to let me in. We were a team.

“I told you about Markus’s preferences," he said finally.

He didn’t say anything else, and I knew immediately what he was talking about. It hadn’t been widely known outside a select few, but Markus Kasper was gay. That was his deep dark secret. It was something that I hadn’t even realized until talking to Lukas after he returned to Greyelf.

“Yes, so Markus was gay. We knew that already. But nobody else did.”

“Oh yes, they did,” Lukas said. I could tell by the frown on his face that his thoughts were turning blacker by the minute. “Markus would tell me that he would meet people like him at clubs in the city when he would come to visit me. He didn’t have any companionship here in Greyelf for fear that someone would find out, and I knew that bothered him a lot. With the council pushing him to take a mate, he thought that he was going to have to give up his entire opportunity to be able to someone to love. He told me a couple of weeks before he died, that he had met someone. He wouldn’t tell me anything else about him. Just that he was really excited about the possibilities for the future."

“So you think that he was meeting someone up on Shulman’s Trail for a secret rendezvous?” I asked. That I wanted to slap myself on the forehead. Of course, that made perfect sense. A secret rendezvous in the middle of the nights and no one would be the wiser. “You think that RAC lured him out there to catch him in that bear trap?”

“I don’t know if we will really know exactly what happened out there. But I do know that Markus had a soft spot for muscular, pretty guys.”

“So Craig was the one who lured him out there?” I thought about the two men back at the jail. Craig was the obvious choice to match Lukas’s description, although I hadn’t thought about it more than a passing thought at the time.

“All I’m saying is Craig was definitely Markus’s type. But I don’t think that those two engineered this whole thing. They’re not that smart. But Joshua, that’s the one that I’m worried about.”

“You said to Craig that you’ve had had security surveying the location for the last couple of weeks. Surely if there was something there that would cause damage, it would’ve been found.”

Lukas frowned. “Think about it, Maren. This all ties together. The fact of the matter is Sheriff Monroe was the one who was in charge of security for the Summit. He expected to beat me yesterday. I know he did, so me kicking his ass was a surprise to everyone. If he wasn’t the alpha, then with what he knew, he was a liability. Believe me, I don’t like it anymore than you do.”

It was horrible to think about. “You can’t honestly think that the sheriff had anything to do with what happened to Markus, could you? They were best friends.”

“What I do know is that Markus told me that he and the sheriff had been having a lot of arguments lately. The sheriff was lobbying for less integration, not more. But Markus thought believed that integration is the only way to have peace for everyone in the future. So he was focused on uniting the clans. Sheriff Monroe wanted peace treaties with the other clans, but only when it came to standing apart from the humans.”

“My God,” I said. “I feel everything I’ve believed is wrong.” Lukas reached across the seat and took my hand. He squeezed it tight. “I’m sorry, Maren. I’ve been really distracted. I’ve forgotten about you.”

I felt my heart swell with love for him. Here he was trying to be the protector of his clan, and he was worried about me. It made me feel special, but also a little bit selfish at the same time. I didn’t want him to feel as if he had to choose between us. I had been waiting for eighteen years for this, so I could wait a little longer. I couldn’t let him be distracted. Still, I did want to put one thing out in the open. “There is something I want, but it doesn’t have to happen right now.”

“Anything. Name it."

I took a deep breath. “I want a real wedding," I said shyly. I felt silly for asking for it. But then again, it’s what all little girls want. I had dreamed of walking down the aisle and meeting Lukas Kasper at the altar for as long as I could remember. Things had moved so fast that I thought I might have missed my opportunity for that. “I mean I know we’re mate and all now, but there’s something about a wedding it’s really important to me."

“Maren, of course, we’re going to have an official wedding,” Lukas said. He squeezed my hand tighter. His eyes locked on mine. “We are mates in the clan, but we will be man and wife to the world. No matter what comes our way, you and I are in this together now. Forever."

His words made me melt. They were the words that I had been longing to hear for so long that there was a part of me that still felt like I was in a dream. But the edges of my dream were marred with things like murder, kidnapping, and violence. That’s what made me think that sometimes my dream might actually turn into a nightmare. I worried now that I was going to lose everything with Lukas that I had just found.

“Whatever happens now, I need you to be careful." I reached across the seat and brushed his hair out of his eyes. He was so handsome it made my heart hurt. He was mine. I needed to take care of him the way that he took care of me.

“I’m always careful,” Lukas said sarcastically.

“I mean it," I said. I have a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t quite shake. Everything was happening so fast.

“Don’t worry,” Lukas said. “I need you to trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

I thought about how many times Lukas had said those words to me over the years. Most of the time, it ended up with him either being thrown in the back of the sheriff’s squad car or bloody in bruised from his most recent fight. Lukas wasn’t known for his thoughtfulness. But as I looked into his eyes, I knew saw a maturity there that hadn’t existed before. I was banking on him being different now, and I had to give him a chance to prove it. So I nodded and squeezed his hand.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m trusting you on this. But if you go off and get yourself hurt, you’re going to have to go find yourself a new mate. I’m not going to put up with that kind of nonsense.”

Lukas chuckled, and I joined him in the laughter. It felt good to laugh.

I was curious about where we were going, even though I didn’t say so. The truck followed the road that bordered the western boundary line of grizzly land and then headed due north into the national state park. Those lands were wilderness.

There was nothing resembling civilization for miles, and the government had agreed that this was a place where shifters could roam free without threat of being hunted. Humans usually stayed away. This was a place where cell phones didn’t work. It was where nature had been returned to nature. Something about the place made a chill ran down my spine. Of course, this would be where the shifters would choose to meet for their secret summit location.

There was a strict no-fly law over all park property. No one could come in or out except on a few remote, isolated roads that ran through the park, many of them only one-lane. It would be easy to get lost forever in a place like that.

We fell into a kind of comfortable silence. Lukas and I often did that from time to time. It was a comfort level that had been developed over the course of many years of friendship. Of course, now there was something more between us, and it made me feel warm inside. I didn’t have to wonder what he was thinking about. He was focused on the hunt for Joshua.  I was just praying that events wouldn’t turn so that I’d lose him again.

We pulled into a dirt parking lot that seem to appear out of nowhere off the right hand side of the road. “So are you going to tell me where were going?”

“This is where the shifter leaders meet.” Lukas shrugged. “It’s isolated, remote, and away from prying eyes. It’s the perfect location.”

I understood what he meant when he said perfect. When he said away from prying eyes, he meant this was a place where shifters ruled the land and were able to be in their natural element, not ours. No matter what the shifters said, there was always a certain uneasiness between them and us. I didn’t like thinking that way. Especially now I was mated to one of them. But I knew that those kinds of prejudices ran deep on both sides. It would take a long time before everyone accepted everyone.

“Are you going to tell me what Markus was planning to propose at the summit?”

“He had a plan for bringing together all of the clans as one,” Lukas said. “He knew that he was going to face a lot of resistance. But as long as we’re all scattered individual clans, we’re not going to get anywhere. He was going to put forward the idea that we all form one giant clan. He said that was the first step in a true world of integration. We had to put aside our own prejudices before we could expect anyone outside to do so."

I thought about the implications of what he said. It made sense. If the shifters were gathered under one umbrella, then there would be only one voice. There wouldn’t be any further need for consensus. They would be able to act as one. “So does that mean there would be only one alpha?” The feeling of dread in my stomach grew larger.

“Just like there’s just one president, there would be only one alpha,” Lukas replied.

The puzzle pieces continued to fall into place now. I understood why there had been such strong resistance to Lukas’s alpha claim. The Greyelf Grizzly council would have understood that by making Lukas the alpha, he was poised to be the one to lead them all. No wonder they had been so outright in speaking against him.

“So Sheriff Monroe…"

“I don’t think the man thought he would lose," Lukas said simply. “Markus used to tell me that Sheriff Monroe would go out and find illegal bear matches to participate in for sport. He enjoyed it."

I thought about the scene that I had witnessed in front of me the day before. I remembered the scars that I had seen on the sheriff’s body before he transformed into his bear. “Well, that explains a lot.”

“He would’ve killed me," Lukas said. “I knew that. I knew it going in, but it didn’t matter. As long as he didn’t get the upper hand in the fight, I stood a chance. Plus, it wasn’t as if I’d never been in a fight myself. I didn’t thank you for what you did for me yesterday. If you hadn’t been there, I don’t think I would’ve been able to do what I did.”

Although I felt a feeling of warmth spread through my limbs, the sentiment really didn’t make me feel any better. Lukas had been in a fight of life and death for the last week, and I had never fully appreciated it. Now that I was his mate, I was right in the middle of it too. It made sense why my father had been so concerned about me. In his own strange way, he had been trying to protect me. But that wasn’t my path. I loved Lukas, and that meant that I would be by his side no matter what. Life or death.

Without that thought firmly in place, I put my hands on the handle of the door and climbed out of the truck. I looked around us. We were in the middle of a dense forest. Although there were a few cars parked around us in what was clearly a parking lot, I didn’t see anyone else in the area. I also didn’t see a path. I didn’t know where we were supposed to go from here. When Lukas said that the meeting location was remote, he meant it.

“It’s just through those trees," Lukas said pointing at a thick overgrowth off to his left.

I still didn’t see anything where he pointed and said so. He smiled softly and took my hand. But then his expression grew solemn. “I shouldn’t have brought you out here with me. I should have left you with Billy. I need to make sure that you’re going to listen to everything that I say.”

He was protective of me, and I understood why. But he didn’t have to worry. I was going to listen, and I would pay attention. By his side was where I belonged, and he couldn’t have made me stay behind no matter what he thought.

I followed closely behind Lukas as we moved into the trees. I still couldn’t see where we were going. But then I heard the noise. We emerged into a clearing, and I gasped. In front of me was the biggest waterfall I had ever seen. It flowed down into a huge pool of water below us and reaching toward the sky all around us were tall walls of stone. “What is this place?"

“Markus had this place made eighteen years ago. He knew that we would need a safe place to be able to meet. He brokered the appropriate agreements with the government to make sure that they wouldn’t interfere with us here. We keep guards along the roads, and we make sure that no one can get in who isn’t approved to pass through. That’s why whoever is doing this needed the sheriff. They needed someone on the inside. Clearly, they had promised him the alpha claim.”

I knew that Lukas was still trying to wrap his brain around the sheriff’s betrayal. I was too. I looked around me at the beautiful landscape that should have calmed my nerves, but I saw only danger. Somewhere, someone had laid the foundation of something to harm everyone here. I didn’t know how or when it was supposed to happen, and I knew that Lukas didn’t either. He was trying to act confidently, but I didn’t think he knew what he was going to do next.