Page 58 of Handcuffed to the Bear

“I’m going to tear you apart,” Rory snarled. His arm muscles bunched, and he pulled himself up to the woodshed roof.

Shit. Her sanctuary had become a trap. She shifted and instinctively extended her claws for traction. Her lynx form had a decent chance of being able to take on a weaponless, naked human, even a large man.

Apparently having the same thought, Rory shifted. The woodshed roof tilted under the weight of a full-grown male lion, but he scrambled onto the cabin roof anyway, heading straight for Casey.

She didn’t have a choice. She half-leaped, half-fell, twisting in midair to land on her feet in the mud beside the cabin, where she narrowly avoided being crushed by Mara and Jack’s thrashing bodies.

Rory snarled in fury and leaped after her—or tried to; his much greater weight hampered him, paws skidding on the cabin’s metal roof. Rather than leaping off, he ended up rolling over the edge and gracelessly belly-flopping on the ground with a tremendous thud.

Mara tore away from Jack and staggered backward, not fighting anymore, just trying to escape. She was covered in blood and gasping. Her neck and shoulder looked like hamburger.

Roger piled into Jack without giving him time to recover. Now it was Jack’s turn to flee. He only went a few steps, though, and gave a tremendous blow of his paw to the propane tank behind the cabin. Casey had an instant to wonderWhat the hell?before Jack’s huge bear claws ripped out the hose and regulator at the top of the tank, knocking it completely off its stand. There was a loud hissing of escaping propane, and suddenly the Fallons had another problem just as pressing as an angry grizzly bear in their midst.

Jack didn’t pause; as the tank toppled behind him, he kept running, dashing between two of the cabins and out into the yard between the cabins and the hill leading down to the dock and the boat. Here he slowed, looking back at Casey.

Casey didn’t wait around to find out if propane in real life was as explosive as it was in the movies. She ran for the dock and the boat.

* * *

Jack’s initial surge of adrenaline and fury had carried him through the early stages of the fight, but he was flagging fast. At least Casey was a quick study, and unhurt as far as he could tell. She shot past him, then slowed to let him catch up.

Jack wanted to tell her not to. At least one of them needed to get to the boat. He skidded to a stop at the top of the hill and turned around, head down, prepared to run interference and give her a chance to get away.

It turned out Roger was the only lion currently in pursuit. Rory had stopped and shifted to shut off the propane, while Mara was effectively out of the fight at this point. Roger, realizing that his odds alone were not the best, slowed and then stopped, just out of reach.

Jack bluff-charged and Roger danced lightly out of claw range. Aside from having been clawed across the face, by Casey from the look of it, he was the least injured of them all. And he seemed to realize that all he had to do was stay out of Jack’s way and let Jack’s energy seep out of him along with the blood he was losing.

Then, looking past him, Jack realized why Rory hadn’t followed. Roger was only a distraction. Meanwhile, his brother had picked up Mara’s rifle, and was even now fitting it to his shoulder.

Fuck!Jack spun and almost collided with Casey. He snapped his teeth at her, having no other way to get his urgency across since he couldn’t talk in this form. Casey, startled, leaped backward on light paws, then whirled and ran for the boat, with Jack a step behind her.

The rifle boomed. The bullet splintered the clear surface of a puddle a few feet in front of Casey. She faltered, startled, then flattened out into a graceful, floating run.

She didn’t slow down when she hit the dock. Instead, she executed a long, graceful leap to the deck of the boat. She skidded across it, digging in her claws to stop herself, and turned cheetah-style by kicking off the cabin, facing back the way she’d come.

Jack wasn’t going to be able to do that. Actually, in his present condition, he wasn’t sure if he could jump at all. And the boat was tied up; it needed to be cast off. He slid to a stop beside the heavy rope looped around a post at the edge of the dock.

The scrabble of paws on the dock and Casey’s snarl alerted Jack right before Roger’s paw took his head off—or tried to. Jack managed to duck partway, and the lion clouted him across the top of the head. Jack’s ears rang.

“Hey, asshole!” someone yelled.

Casey had shifted back to human form. She was standing balanced on the deck with her feet spread apart, wielding a gaff hook—a pole with a hook on the end, used for hooking fish into the boat. As Roger looked up, Casey rammed it at him, hook end forward. She got him in the face.

Jack couldn’t tell whether the hook had actually gone into his eye, but Roger shrieked and lurched backward. His back legs went off the dock and he fell into the water.

Casey gasped and staggered. There was a noise like a slap, and an instant later, the crack of the rifle.

She’d been presenting a perfect target, standing there.

Casey fell to the deck. Jack snapped his jaws on the heavy rope and gave it a tremendous sideways wrench with his powerful neck muscles. The rope cut deep into the sides of his mouth, but this was the least of his worries at the moment. It broke in a spray of bloody spittle and Jack gathered himself in a leap he hadn’t realized he was capable of.

The rifle cracked again. Jack hit the deck, splayed out in a tangle of limbs. Riding on a wave of adrenaline, he still didn’t know if he’d been hit, but if so, it didn’t stop him from clawing his way to Casey.

She was down but conscious, clutching her left leg below the knee with bloody hands. Rory had probably been aiming for her chest, but failed to compensate for the slope and the bullet’s parabolic trajectory. A wave of heat and cold went through Jack. For an instant he was back in the desert, kneeling with Avery in his lap and blood all over both of them, soaking into the wet red sand.

“Jack,” Casey gasped. “It hurts.”

Another rifle shot splintered the deck next to Jack’s knee. The boat was bobbing sideways, drifting freely on the low waves in the sheltered cove, but Rory was going to get a lucky shot sooner or later. They had to get out of sight.

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