Page 43 of Handcuffed to the Bear

She shifted to make sure the vole stayed down. Jack seemed to be sleeping comfortably, so she went to explore further.

Their cave was part of a much larger cave complex, a series of connected caves running the length of the rocky overhang they were sheltering beneath. Sometimes she had to scramble over places where the ceiling had slumped, or duck out into the rain and then back into the dry. Her level of anxiety and alertness ramped up the farther she got from Jack, and when she couldn’t take it anymore, she turned and trotted back the other way, sniffing the air as she went.

Something was starting to bother her. It had to do with the rodent bones. Sure, it made sense there would be some bones from small dead creatures up here. They couldn’t live very long, and some of them would probably die in the cave.

But ... there were alotof bones. Her paws kept whispering over them. Sometimes they broke underfoot with little dry crunches. And not all of them were rodent-tiny. Some were actually kind of large. Like this one ...

She shifted back and knelt to pick up the bones, one at a time. She didn’t really know bones very well, but it had been some kind of medium-sized creature, she thought. And the skull was definitely not from a vole or a squirrel. She turned it over in her hands, looking at the large eye sockets, the blunt fangs?—

When she realized what she was looking at, she dropped it, and screamed.

She was pressed against the wall, shaking, as far away from the bones as she could get, when a vast dark bulk loomed in the mouth of the cave. Casey screamed again, then subsided into gasping when the great dark looming thing melted into humanform Jack.

“Casey. Hey.” He limped to her side, stumbling and half-falling at the end. “Hey, hey. What’s wrong? What happened? Did the lions come back?”

Casey shook her head vigorously. She wiped her hair out of her eyes, swallowed, got a grip on herself. It was stupid. They were just bones. They couldn’t hurt her—and, just as importantly, they were long past suffering now. “I found ...” She swallowed. Pointed. “I found those.”

Jack went to look. He figured it out a lot faster than she had. “Oh,” he said softly, cradling the skull in his hands. “This is ... was a bobcat, I think.”

“Not a normal bobcat.”

“No,” Jack said quietly. He set the skull gently and reverently back on the ground.

“Wendy was an ocelot.”

They both looked around. The caves weren’t a complete charnel ground; the bones were scattered, a few here, a few there. An odd one caught Casey’s eye, weirdly twisted like bleached deadwood. Then she realized she was looking at someone who’d died in the act of shifting. Shifters always stayed dead in the shape they’d worn when they’d died, but she had never seen that before.

She shuddered and looked away.

“Someone should collect them. Figure out who they are. Return them to their families.”

“Someone will,” Jack said. “But not us. Not now.”

He was leaning against the wall of the cave now, sitting with his head tipped back against the stone. He looked pale and unwell.

“No,” Casey agreed. “Not now.”

After a little while, she slid her arm under his shoulders and helped him up.

CHAPTER13

Jack had awakenedto find Casey gone. His first reaction was an instinctive panic that startled him even more than her absence. He pushed himself up, sniffing the air frantically. After a moment he caught her lynx scent, and heard small rustles not far away. She was exploring the cave. There was no hint of lion smell on the air, so he lay back down again, knowing he should get up and join her, but unable to make himself move.

He felt awful. It wasn’t just the pain of the places where the lions had savaged him, but also the overall drain of his body struggling to repair it. He ached as if with arthritis; he felt both feverish and freezing at the same time. It was like being down with a nasty case of flu.

Well, you knew you’d pay later for pushing yourself so hard.

His nose bumped the limp body of a dead ground squirrel. Casey’s scent was on it. He swallowed it in a quick bite. It wasn’t much, but it gave his body a little to work with, at least.

He was desperately thirsty, but didn’t want to move.

Casey’s scream, it turned out, was the one thing that could galvanize him into action. He lurched out into the rain, stumbling on shaky legs, knowing only that he had to find her. Help her.

... which, as it turned out, was unnecessary. There was nothing to save her from, only the bones of the dead, and the tragic story they told.

Reluctantly he let her help him back to the other cave, which was, mercifully, free of the bones of the lions’ victims, at least in their immediate vicinity. He paused to drink from a puddle of rainwater, cupping it in his hands, and then Casey eased him down onto a soft bed of moss. He was shivering with cold, but couldn’t summon the energy to shift back into a bear.

Casey busied herself gathering more moss and piling it on him.

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