Briar on Bruins' Peak (Bruins' Peak Bears Book 7) Read online

  First, Evelyn’s giant head of hair slapped Black Feather right in the face. He never saw it coming. In fact, he appeared to be on his way to talk to Tina the second before it happened, but the smack in the face stopped him in his tracks. He doubled over, hand protecting his eyes, and Evelyn went completely red. Horrified, she bent down with him, her arm around his back and seemed to be apologizing.

  As Grey watched them, they stood up together, Black still wiping his eyes as they watered and Evelyn clasping her hands, mouthing words like, “So sorry,” and “Please forgive me.” After a moment, Black started smiling, and soon Evelyn was smiling with him. The two of them talked through the end of the song, Evelyn forgetting that she had been dancing with Sam and Black shrugging off his intended conversation with Tina. The song ended, and the whole room went quiet for a moment.

  The candles were burning lower, and the light was softening. The band followed suit by playing a slow, gentle melody that rocked back and forth. Black and Evelyn shyly reached for one another and started moving together to the gentle music. Grey knew he was staring, but he couldn’t look away. He’d never watched love grow before, and here it was springing up so quickly.

  Soon, Evelyn had completely relaxed into Grey’s arms, her head against his chest and his head on top of her mess of curls. Black had a mess of a beard sprouting from his face, and it kept getting caught on the top Evelyn’s crazy hairstyle, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  The two moved and swayed in a little circle as if they were the only two people in the room, not seeing the people who bumped into them, the eyes staring at them as the song ended, but they kept dancing. They also didn’t see Haddie from the bottle store walk right up and stare at Evelyn.

  Haddie waited until the wig got caught on Black’s sorry excuse for a beard again, then stepped in and pulled her hair up.

  “I knew it,” she cried triumphantly. “This isn’t a shifter. It’s The First Daughter. And this is her wig!”

  A huge gasp went up from the crowd as Harper, daughter of President Bachmann, tried to grab at her fake hair. Haddie quickly threw it to a friend who threw it to another, and soon the mass of curls was bouncing its way through the crowd.

  “No,” Harper tried, “I’m not. I’m someone else. Please, just give me back my hair.”

  “Why?” Haddie challenged her. “You have such pretty, shiny hair, Harper.”

  The crowd gathered around Harper. Grey joined them, hoping to reach her, but all he could do was watch as she looked from one astonished face to another. “I…I didn’t…I just wanted…I’m sorry, okay?”

  No one responded. Instead, hands reached out to touch the human girl. Some leaned in to smell her and take in all of her bathed, well-fed presence. “Wow,” someone said. “She’s so soft.”

  “Please don’t eat me!”

  As soon as she said those words, Harper instantly saw that she’d made a mistake. All of the curious faces changed to offended, glowering ones. One person in the crowd scoffed a quiet, “Typical.”

  Black leaned down to reassure her. “Um, we don’t eat humans.”

  “Yeah,” Haddie jumped in. “If you ever came down out of that ridiculous palace, you’d know that.”

  “I did!” Harper put her hand to her forehead and looked down at the ground. “I ran away from home. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. Everything in the palace is so…just, like…intense. I had to get out. And Tina told me there was a party here and that she would get me in, so–”

  “Tina? Tina Traxon?” Black looked over at Tina. “You invited a human to a shifter party?”

  “What?” Tina around the room and then gave a big eye roll. “Oh, whatever. I know half of you in here sneak out to pretend to be human anytime something interesting is happening in the city. Now a human wants to pretend to be one of us. Deal with it, you bunch of hypocrites.” She looked away as if none of this was any of her concern and focused on chugging the rest of her beer in an attempt to get her own little party going again. No luck. Once her bottle was empty, she was right back where she started, face-to-face with a less than happy mob.

  “Fine. I invited her. I snuck her in. Sorry, I just liked that she wasn’t scared of us and wanted to hang out. She wants to party with us. It’s cool.”

  The crowd considered Tina’s last comment and little shrugs and head tilts started drifting around from one shifter to another. Black Feather put his hands on Harper’s shoulders, and she looked up at him with big, watery eyes.

  “You’re not here to ambush us or spy or anything? Just hang out?”

  “Yes, I swear!” She turned to the crowd and repeated her promise. “Really, I don’t want anything from anybody. I just wanted to have fun. Tina is the most fun person I know, so I figured a shifter party in a cave would be awesome. And it is. I mean, look around! You are all so cool.”

  Immediately, the crowd scoffed. Cool? A bunch of shifters? This girl was reaching. They all relaxed and lost interest in their latest discovery. Sam signaled to the band to strike up the music again, and they complied with a hard, throbbing song. Everyone cheered and went back to the dance floor. Grey overheard a quick exchange between Black Feather and Harper, but by the time he was close enough to either of them to actually say something, they were already kissing.

  Even though he knew it was weird, he stared at them as they exchanged a long, slow kiss. Both seemed completely enchanted by the other. They were each lost in one another, drunk on the taste of each other and neither even noticing Grey close by. A big lump rose in his throat. He tried to get it down with a swig of beer, but that just made him choke.

  And then the earth shook, the ceiling cracked, and somewhere across the room there was a terrible scream. Grey dropped his beer, and the sound of the glass shattering on the ground was enough to transform him and send him out of the cave, flapping his little wings as hard and as fast as he could.

  He never looked back to see what happened to Harper.

  Chapter 8

  Rescue

  Tina changed to her wolf form and dashed out of the cave as fast as her paws could carry her. She heard screaming and crashing all around her. The ground seemed to be melting; nothing felt solid or safe. Everything seemed to be liquefying and crumbling all at once. The voices behind her made her panic even more.

  “I can’t move!”

  “Harper! Harper? Where are you? Someone help me find her!”

  “Tina!”

  She stopped right at the entrance as birds, wild cats, and fellow wolves bounded past her. Sam flew by in human form so fast that he was a blur. Grimacing, Tina turned back to run against the crowd and toward Harper’s voice.

  Different animals and humans kept getting in her way and screamed for her to move. Above all the shaking and chastising, she could hear a desperate human cry coming from deeper inside the cave. Tina ducked to the left as a spire slammed down into the ground just beside her. She looked up to see that more were shaking loose and sped up.

  Another spire landed in front of her, then another just barely grazed her tail. She ran in a straight shot into the party entrance and was staggered by what she saw.

  The whole cave seemed to have been turned inside out. The roof had fallen in big pieces, and what had been a nice, wide entrance before, was now just a small crawl space leading through the rubble. Wolf Tina hunched low and crawled through it. There, on the other side, was Harper lying on the ground and screaming in pain. The Earth stopped shaking, and Tina approached her gently.

  Tina ran over to her and smelled blood right away. Harper was alive, but she was trapped. A piece of rock had fallen on top of her leg, trapping her and breaking the bone. Her other leg was scraped up pretty badly, but otherwise fine. Tina looked around for any kind of help, but didn’t see anyone. She licked Harper’s face and quickly ran out. She needed a bear.

  As she ran, she heard Harper screaming after her. Tina started to slow down, but the shaking started again with tiny tremors and sent her out of the cave.


  Outside, in the settlement, everyone was back home and nursing their wounds. She knew her mother would be worried, but she didn’t know what to do. If she went home to console her mom, it would be more time alone and injured for Harper. If she went straight there, she could possibly save her. What she would do with the injured president’s daughter she didn’t know, but she would worry about that later.

  She found Sam and quickly ran up to him. “Sam! Come with me!” She didn’t wait for a response as she dashed back toward the cave. She glanced back over her shoulder to see him standing and considering, so she ran up again and grasped his hand in her mouth to pull him along with her.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  “Yes! She’s trapped!”

  Sam sighed and transformed. Together, the wolf and the bear ran at full speed back to the cave, leaving the safety and the warmth of home behind them.

  The additional shaking had made the entrance even smaller, but Sam made short work of the blockages, pulling rocks out of the way as if they were weightless. Tina waited outside as he cleared a path and then called for her to follow him.

  Inside, there was now total destruction. The cave had gone from a strong, arched structure to a messy collection of broken spires, boulders, and a cracked floor all around her. Some of the boulders had blood stains on them, but she couldn’t smell any dead bodies. There was a different smell in the air, but Tina couldn’t place it. She’d never encountered this scent before and didn’t know what it meant. It wasn’t from the shifters, and it wasn’t anything organic in any way; this smell was something manufactured and clearly dangerous.

  Slowly, the pair made their way back to where Harper was trapped.

  “Harper! Can you hear me?”

  A long silence followed the question. Finally, they heard a soft groan in the distance.

  “That’s her! Sam, hurry.”

  Sam got the former party entrance cleared little by little, and soon Tina was able to dart through. She ran on top of a field of broken, jagged rocks with one giant piece of stone on top. Tina spun in every direction as she desperately looked for Harper, but she was nowhere to be found.

  “Sam! Help me!”

  Her friend started to enter the room, then held back. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  From below Tina’s paws, she heard, “I’m here. I’m underneath you.”

  Quickly, Sam began moving some rocks away from the edge of the room, but this just shifted some of the rocks around and threatened to smash Harper as she lay pinned down under a massive slab of stone. They froze; how would they get her out of there?

  “Tina,” Sam said with a serious face, “move out of the room.”

  She quickly scampered back and watched Sam as he gingerly stepped on the rocks. “Harper,” he called down, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes. And I see your foot. It’s right by my left hand.”

  Sam eased a boulder up to find a small space created by smaller rocks holding up the larger main slab. He sighed. This was going to take all his strength.

  “Harper,” he said calmly, “I’m going to lift this big slab off of you. Can you move at all?”

  “No. My leg is broken.”

  The two shifters looked at one another – would they even be able to get her out? Tina considered running back for more help, but just as she turned around she saw a little shadow moving. She watched as it approached and froze as she saw the animal walking in. It was a fossa.

  The fossa was almost a cat; it had the shell-shaped ears and snub nose of a panther or leopard, but the claws on its feet were just a little too long as the fossa’s movements were more liquid and less predictable than a cat. The creature lowered its head and made eye contact with Tina, assuring her that she was there to help, and Tina gave her a nod of respect. The two approached one another and nuzzled for a brief moment, then ran up to Sam.

  “Alright, you two,” he said solemnly. “Here’s the plan. I lift this big slab. The two of you get that boulder off of Harper. Shift as fast as you can and get right under it. You don’t have to lift it all the way up, just enough to get her out. The three of us will carry her out to safety. Ready?”

  The two nodded and moved back, giving Sam some space. Using all his strength, he pushed up one edge of the slab until Harper’s head was visible underneath.

  Tina and Larissa shifted quickly and jumped down to the edge of the boulder that had broken Harper’s leg. The two went into a deep squat and counted together.

  “One…two…three!” The two girls were strong, but the rock didn’t budge. They looked at one another and each saw the same thing – a friend in full panic.

  “We have to try again,” Tina insisted. “Sam, don’t lower that rock.”

  “Hurry!”

  “Okay, once more. One, two, go!” Now aware of the rock’s force, the two friends doubled their efforts and desperately pushed the boulder. It moved. Not far, but Harper was able to shift to the side just far enough that she was able to pull hard on Tina’s ankle. The leverage gave her a few more inches, and she quickly rolled toward her friends just as the boulder dropped out of their hands and grazed her ankle.

  They helped her stand and put an arm around each of their shoulders, then carried her out. Her leg was completely smashed and hung limply in the air. As they moved away, Sam let the rock slab crash into the ground. He joined them, still in bear form and very sweaty.

  “Put her on my back. You girls walk behind us.” He lay on the rocks, and Larissa and Tina gingerly placed Harper – broken leg and all – face down on Sam’s back. She grabbed his fur tightly and let out a little cry of surprise as he stood. He ambled out of the cave slowly with the two girls close by in case Harper began to slip.

  Together, they made their way out and down. Sam took slow, heavy steps. His efforts inside the cave had left him exhausted, but, otherwise, he was fine. The group moved along the path back home quietly, no one wanting to say out loud what an injured First Daughter would actually mean. They were all sure that their settlement would be crawling with law enforcers in no time, but what could they do? If they turned Harper in, they would all be killed for helping her get away and hiding her. If they hid her, their homes would be ransacked, and they would be beaten publicly and possibly jailed.

  Larissa exchanged a glance with Tina, then quickly shifted and ran off. The group stopped a moment to watch her as she tore off and into the dawn.

  “Where’s she going?”

  Tina shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you. But you know how secretive she can be. It’s usually better not to ask.”

  Sam nodded and continued. “Are we going to your house? The palace? Help me out here.”

  “Please don’t take me to the palace.” Both Sam and Tina looked at Harper, who they realized was crying into Sam’s fur. “He’ll kill me. I mean, he’ll actually kill me. If he ever finds out where I was and why…”

  Tina reached out to Harper’s hand and held it for a moment. “Don’t worry, Harper. We’ll keep you safe.”

  “We?” Sam looked at her and shook his head. “Sorry, Tina, but you’re on your own from here on out. I can’t be harboring a president’s daughter. I’m all my father has left. If I get thrown in a labor camp or a jail, he’ll fall apart.”

  Tina did a double-take at her friend. “Your dad? What are you talking about? Your dad is young and strong. He has a job. He’s one of the toughest shifters I know.”

  Sam clucked and sighed as he studied the ground. “You don’t know the whole story, Tina.” He adjusted his shoulders, and a floppy Harper flowed with the movement. “Look, I’ll take her to your house, but on the condition that you don’t name me if you get caught. Alright?”

  Harper turned her head to look at Tina with a tear-stained face. Tina raised her eyebrows at her friend – are we doing this? The human of the trio considered the idea, then nodded her head. Yes.

  “Okay, Sam. Let’s get to my place. Then you can forget all about thi
s night.”

  “Deal.” He wandered to the edge of the settlement and looked in both directions. The party the night before had the younger shifters in bed with hangovers. Parents were probably gathered at a random house, possibly Tina’s, but they had to risk it. The three quietly walked along the edge of the settlement, winding their way between the spaces of the structures, pausing every three of four houses to listen for other shifters. No sign of anyone. They were just a few minutes away from Tina’s place, when they came upon Larissa back in human form.

  “Hi.”

  In true Larissa style, she was waiting in the shadows, not moving. Even as she spoke, she stayed camouflaged by darkness. She stepped forward, sweaty and tired-looking. She glanced up at Harper.

  “How’s our patient?”

  “Broken.” Tina reached up and took Harper’s hand. Harper didn’t return the gesture; she’d passed out from the pain. “We have to get her inside.”

  Sam looked at Larissa. He leaned forward and smelled her with his big, wet nose. “Where did you go?”

  “To make sure no one comes here to look for Harper. I’m not watching shifters get beaten up again.” She stopped there, seeing no reason to explain further. She stepped in front of the group to lead the way, looking back over her shoulder. “It’s fine. Just forget it and follow me.” Sam exchanged a glance with Tina, exasperating Larissa even more. “Come on. Let’s go!”

  They all followed her, no questions asked, and ducked into Tina’s house. There, her mother was fast asleep. Larissa helped Tina slide Harper off of Sam’s back and into Tina’s bed.

  “Where will you sleep?” Larissa looked all around the house her father had helped Tina and her mother build so many years ago. It was big and well-made, but contained almost no furniture.

  “I’m comfortable on the floor. Don’t worry.” She picked up an old blanket and spread it on the floor. Sam shifted back into human form and shook his boy head at them.

  “You girls are insane. You should take her home.”