Page 33 of Handcuffed to the Bear

Together the two of them circled the cabin, feeling their way carefully and staying alert for hidden traps. Down the hill to their left, water rushed in a brush-choked gully—no point in digging a well with all these mountain streams to choose from. Rain pattered lightly all around them, and thunder cracked loudly, not far off.

In the front yard of the cabin, an old oil drum was rusting away in a tangle of nettles. The cabin door hung open on rusty hinges.

Jack put Casey behind him and peeked inside to make sure they weren’t setting themselves up for an ambush. “Safe,” he told her, and they scuttled under the intact section of the roof just as the sky opened up and dumped a waterfall of rain on top of them.

The only intact piece of furniture that remained in the old cabin was a small, rusty potbelly stove, with moss growing on top of it and leaves poking out the half-open ash grate. Other than that, it was empty except for drifted leaves and an old table made out of two planks, with one end slotted into the cabin wall and the other fallen through the slats of a broken crate. The collapsed roof slanted down to the middle of the dirt floor, forming a makeshift lean-to with long grass and weeds growing around it. It was leaking in a dozen places, water dribbling through rust holes and around the edges to form slowly deepening puddles around their feet. But the walls stood intact all around them, providing a sense of security that Jack reminded himself was an illusion.

He tried to close the door, but years of coastal rains had frozen the hinges three-quarters of the way open. Frustrated, he applied a thrust of bearish strength. The hinges cracked and the top one came off in a shower of rust, leaving the door tilted drunkenly against its frame.

Good going, Agent Ross.

“Jack,” Casey murmured. She pointed up. He looked. In the dimness it was hard to see what she was pointing at, but the humming gave it away. There was another yellowjacket nest up there.

“It’s okay,” he said, because Casey had gone tense next to him. “Just try not to bother them, and they won’t bother us.”I hope.

“Fellow refugees from the rain,” she said, casting nervous glances up at the nest as they began to search the cabin for anything useful. “Are there such a thing as insect shifters, do you know?”

“There are a handful. I know a lot more bird and reptile shifters, though. I don’t know why. Maybe they just stay under the radar better than the rest of us.”

Rain thundered on the old metal roof, dripping down around them. Casey was beginning to shiver and Jack felt needles of ice crawling down his spine, up his legs. His arm ached horribly. Hypothermia was going to be more of a problem than the lions soon. He knew various ways to make a fire without matches, but few that were likely to be effective in a torrential downpour.

Lightning flashed overhead with an almost simultaneous boom and crack of thunder. Casey jumped, dropping a handful of leaves she’d been sifting through for tools or other items.

“There’s just nothing here,” she groaned, scooping up another handful and throwing it at the wall. The rain caught the fluttering leaves and pounded them into the muddy ground.

“Yeah, looks like the place has been picked over pretty good. I doubt we’re the first ... people to find it.”

The first victims, he’d almost said, biting it off and switching in mid-sentence as he remembered that the last victim had been her best friend.

They did find a few things: a rusty can (Jack set it on the windowsill to catch rainwater), a broken glass jar, a rotted burlap sack. Jack shook this out to get rid of potential mouse nests or insects, and then draped it over Casey’s shoulders. She gave him a look.

“If it bothers you from a feminist perspective, we can share,” Jack pointed out. “No sense both of us falling over from cold, though.”

“We’re handcuffed together. If one of us goes down, the other?—”

Jack’s cuffed hand shot out, dragging hers along, and clapped over her mouth.

He wasn’t sure what had tipped him off that they weren’t alone. There was no way to hear anything over the sound of the rain. It was a sense beyond the usual five, an atavistic predator’s instinct.

Jack took his hand off Casey’s mouth and touched his finger to her lips. Then he leaned slowly out from under the dubious shelter of the collapsed roof to glance first through the doorway, and then out the window into the backyard.

Lightning flashed just as he did so, lighting up the dripping woods. For an instant, every blade of grass and water-bowed wildflower behind the cabin had its own sharp shadow. And it turned the lion at the edge of the woods to a great statue cast in molten silver.

The flash of light died on a thunderclap. Jack blinked against the afterimages. The lion was still there, standing belly-deep in meadow grass and flowers under the dull gray light of a rainy afternoon.

No, he thought.Not lion. Lioness.There was no mane. This was one of the Fallon sisters.

Just as he realized it, she shifted. The lioness’s human form was a tall, statuesque naked woman, her limbs lean and muscular. Her long blonde hair was dark with water, plastered to her neck.

“I know you’re in there,” she called, pitching her voice to be audible above the rain. “I can smell you, little prey. And hear you.”

Casey looked up at Jack, her eyes huge.

No sense in trying to hide their presence. Jack forced the cold-numbed fingers of his injured arm to work, grasping one of the timbers on the underside of the collapsed roof. His shoulder muscles bunched as he gave it a tremendous yank. Pain flared up his arm, but the rusty nails pulled out, leaving him holding a club about four feet long with nails sticking out crookedly all down its length.

He stared at it, then ran his thumb over the tip of one of the bent, rusty nails.

“I thought so,” the lioness called. “Come on out, little prey animals. Or will you cower in your burrow like the mice you are?”

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