Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance) (A Jamesburg Shifter Romance) (12 page)

“I didn’t expect you to dive out the car window like a fox version of Sonny Crockett,” West said, with a grin. “But what’s with the tomatoes?”

“Habit,” she said back, very quietly. “And as far as the tomatoes, that’s kind of her thing. Apparently. Don’t ask me to try and make any sense of a crazy person’s crazy.”

“Just weird, is all,” West grumbled.

“Hush, we’re not sure she isn’t here.”

“Ralph said she wasn’t, right? He’s very rarely wrong about this kind of thing.”

Elena
really
wished West would stop talking in his normal, huge, delicious voice.

“Very rarely means ‘sometimes’, so shut up! Check that freezer.”

With all the stealth he could muster, which wasn’t very much, West tugged the massive door open. “Shit!” he hissed. “This is...”

“Oh God, don’t tell me you found bodies,” Elena whispered, turning her attention away from the house’s window. “She’s got a bunch of dolls in there. Pretty much screams Jame Gumb.”

“Gumby?” West asked, still looking into the freezer in horror.

“Uh,
Silence of the Lambs
? You know, the best-selling novel turned massive, award winning movie? Hannibal Lecter?”

“I don’t like scary stuff.”

Shaking her head, Elena had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. “Bear, bear, easy to scare,” she said.

“Fox, fox, put on socks?”

She snickered, and crept up beside him. Ready for anything, she took a deep breath and looked inside. Her shoulders slumped, and she stood up straight. “Really?” she asked. “A bunch of vacuum packed meat from Sam’s? You got me all excited over... exactly what normal people keep in deep freezes?”

West shrugged. “You asked if there were bodies,” he said. “Didn’t specify, you know.”

“Bear, bear, I guess that’s fair.”

“Fox, fox, uh... do you have any clocks?”

Snorting ingloriously, Elena chewed her lip. “Okay, rhyme time aside—”

“That was one too, shoe.”

“Oh my God you’re a child!” she hissed, still trying to keep from laughing. “
Anyway!
Whether or not half a cow is a normal thing for a freezer, it’s absolutely not a normal thing for a rabbit.”

“It is for a carnivorous rabbit,” West said.

Elena arched her eyebrows. “Yeah, and when’s the last time you heard of one of those?”

“Bear, bear, uh, that’s fair.”

“I already used that one.” West reached out and pinched Elena gently on the shoulder.

Elena stuck her tongue out and eased the lid of the freezer closed. The air pressure change sucked it tight, and she moved to the front door. “Want me to bash it in?” West asked.

“Uh, how about no.” Elena pulled what appeared to be two chopsticks out of her hair, and unscrewed them to reveal a set of lock picks. Immediately, she went to work.

“Shit, shit, lock picking kit.” West was smiling, big and broad, when Elena shot a glance in his direction.

“Very good, baby child, very good. I’m glad you know how rhymes work.” She chuckled under her breath as she went back to slowly twisting her tools, getting a feel for the pins in the lock.

“Elena,” West said. “Why are you bothering with the door handle lock? There’re three deadbolts.”

“Yeah, that aren’t locked. Why would you bother with all this security and not use it? Now be quiet. One,” she said, sticking her tongue out and biting down in concentration. “Two.” She turned the pin tool just a hair. “Three!” The tumbler turned, the pins fell, and she pushed the door open.

“You’re cute when you stick your tongue out.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Elena said, quirking her mouth in half a smile. “I guess if anyone’s here we’d know it by now.”

Stepping in, Elena swept her eyes around the darkened living area, and when her eyes adjusted to the low light, gasped. “Jesus!”

“Huh?”

“It’s like I’m sitting in the middle of a horror movie. They’re all
staring
at me.”

“Oh
wow
,” West exhaled. “This is incredible.” He crossed the room and picked one of the dolls up off the shelf with extreme care. “Such craftsmanship.” He turned the doll over, and pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket, examining something.

He nodded. “Look at this,” he said.

Elena walked to his side. “What’s so important?”

“This is a Bergmann doll, turn of the century.”

“What’s so special about that? Fourteen years—”

“The
last
century,” West whispered. “All bisque, incredibly hard to work with. This room must be worth a fortune.”

“Star Wars toys and baby dolls? Really? This is the hand I’ve been dealt?”

“Yeah, yeah,” West said. “But what this tells me isn’t just that she has good taste in antiques, it’s that she’s got money. Either money, or a massive antique doll inheritance. But judging from how many there are, I’m going with money.”

The entire room was packed full of the gawking, staring faces; shelf after shelf full of carefully arranged, incredibly unsettling, soulless eyes.

“I wish she specialized in, I dunno, old board games or something.” Elena said, shivering. “This creeps me the hell out. Come on.”

Room by room, the unlikely pair moved through the house. And, room after room, they found absolutely nothing. There were no signs of life, not even completely normal ones. The toilet paper in the house’s only bathroom was folded into the triangle shape that only happens at hotels without weekly rates. The sheets in the bedroom were crisply tucked, creases so sharp they’d cut.

The only sign that anyone actually lived in this place was a single plate in the kitchen sink. She looked down at it briefly, but found it completely clean, like someone had carefully washed it, and then just left it sitting there instead of putting it away.

“Here,” West said. He opened the huge china cabinet in the corner of the room, gingerly picking up a wine glass by the base of the stem. “Fingerprint on the side there.”

Elena nodded, and dusted the glass, lifted the print and stored it before making sure to clean up after herself. “Good eyes,” she said as she replaced the glass.

“Ugh, look at this,” she said, popping a latex glove into place and lifting the red-stained dentures that were arranged neatly on the table. “Why? Why would anyone actually choose to own this? Serious Francis Dolarhyde vibes coming my way.”

“Francis—”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, smiling despite the treasure in her paws. “You don’t like scary stuff.”

“Anyway,” he pursed his lips with a good dose of attitude, “must be hard for a rabbit to eat much of anything except vegetables,” West said. “Take a sample, might be useful.”

Nodding, she swabbed one of the sharp, awful looking teeth, as well as the underside where it would sit against the gums.
Especially since I have one that still needs to be analyzed
, she thought. Shuddering, she placed the long cotton swab in a Ziploc, and scrawled ‘denture sample’ on the bag with her marker. “A girl’s gotta eat,” she said. “I guess.” Rethinking her evidence gathering, Elena took the actual fixture – the top one, since it had the gnarliest teeth – and dropped it in the bag.

Bottom denture replaced, everything back in order, the two sneaking sleuths finished their examination with a lot of questions and zero answers. “Well, what now?” West asked as soon as he had climbed in the car to find Elena already sitting there. “That’s always going to surprise me, isn’t it?”

She gave him an innocent look. “It’s habit,” she said. “Fun too. You should try it sometime.”

West laughed out loud. “Yeah, I’m sure you’d like to see that. Hell,
I
would like to see that.”

For a moment, they watched each other, each studying the other’s face. When Elena finally broke her gaze, she grabbed his hand.

“You okay?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s weird, this whole thing. How, apparently, no one believes this strange little person is doing anything. It’s almost like she’s going on these rampages for a reason, but God only knows what it is.”

“I think you just said it,” West said, looking especially thoughtful. “Think about it. You said it yourself, she’s a strange little person, and no one believes she’s capable of much. What would feel worse that just being a... well, a nothing?”

Elena sat in silence for a long moment. “Still doesn’t make it right to go on a mission to, apparently, eradicate carrots.”

“If it works, think of the beta carotene deficiencies we’re going to see.”

“Is that a concern?” Elena asked, scrunching her nose. “I was thinking more the huge monetary loss for farmers and the cannery if there’s no carrots to sell.”

“Beta carotene, yeah, it’s a pretty serious thing. I mean, how else are you going to give some little kid six pounds of carrots and challenge him to turn himself orange?”

“Hold on,” Elena said. “Is that
real
? I thought that was some bullshit that moms told their kids to keep them from eating all the carrots.”

“Scouts’ honor,” West said. “I did it. I turned orange when I was a kid. I loved carrots so much that one day I guess my mom left my sister’s baby food out on the counter, not thinking that the six year old would, you know, break into it and eat like twenty jars of strained carrots. I was as orange as the day is... whatever.”

Elena was shaking her head. “You seriously ate so much baby food that you turned orange? That’s,” she trailed off.

West shrugged nonchalantly. “Bears get hungry, whatcha gonna do?”

She realized, right then, that she was still holding his hand, and he wasn’t making any move to get it away from her. “This feels good,” she said.

“Feels right,” West added. “Feels like this is how it should have been all along. Feels like I wish I woulda found you a thousand years ago instead of floating through life alone, convinced I’d stay that way.”

“That’s,” Elena trailed off momentarily. “That’s beautiful, and that’s exactly how I feel. I couldn’t possibly say it better.”

In the center console of the Buick, Elena’s phone buzzed, jiggling amidst the coins and odd collection of paperclips and rubber bands. She grabbed it, hoping that either the text would solve her problem, or it was a wrong number.

“I hate phones,” she grumbled. “It’s never the news you want. Especially when they ring at times you wish they wouldn’t.”

“That’d be why I don’t bother,” West said. “I don’t have any of those ideas about radio waves cooking my brain, or satellite signals polluting my skull and making me want a Big Mac. I just don’t like being tied down. When I’m digging around in the dirt, or taking care of my animals, that’s what I’m doing. Not answering a wrong number call for someone I don’t know’s Walgreen’s prescription. Which, by the way, I can’t get rid of. They won’t stop, but at least that’s the landline.”

“That was oddly specific,” Elena said, smiling despite her irritation. The phone buzzed again, she let out a long sigh and picked it up. “It’s from Ralph.”

“And?”

“Looks like our friend has struck again, only this time she’s upping her game. That industrial field the cannery uses? Not only did she wreck it, she’s apparently poisoned jars of carrots.”

“The cannery does that anyway,” West said with a wry grin.

“Right, thanks crusader of organics, what I meant is, before she wrecked the field, she apparently got some kind of herbicide into the actual cans and jars going out of the place. They were all caught in time, but still.”

She remembered he was still holding her hand, and found comfort in the warmth of West’s palm for a moment. When she looked back to his face, there was something sinister behind his eyes – something darker and almost... dangerous?

“What is it?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

West clenched and relaxed his jaws. “This is what happens when people go unnoticed. When no one cares.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Elena said. “This rabbit is poisoning the town’s food supply, and you’re getting all touchy-feely about her childhood?”

West shook his head, dispelling the strange, irritating trance that had fallen over him. “Sorry. It’s just that she isn’t the only one, that’s all. Nothing, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

Yeah, I’ll say it’s nothing
, Elena thought as she filed this away for later.
I’m going to get through this maze of a man if it’s the last thing I do
.

“She’s active,”
another text messaged buzzed through.
“She’s dangerous, too. She got pulled over for erratic driving and when the hyena went to her car, she bit him with some weird dentures.”

She read the message aloud, while West listened, squeezing and releasing the wheel. “What did she do afterward?”

“I dunno, but,” Elena trailed off, waiting for the next message. “Oh, here we go.”

“Last seen heading west on the interstate, but I have to tell you – don’t chase her. Just don’t. This one is unhinged, and I don’t want to see you hurt.”

She shook her head. “I just don’t know about all this,” she said. “There’s too much going on for me to be sure what is happening or why. But I do know that no one’s going to stop her, unless...”

Elena fumbled to respond to the text message, but just gave up a moment later and went for the old fashioned method. “Hey, Ralph?” she asked as soon as he picked up. “If she bit a cop, why isn’t the department after her? I got nothing on the scanner.”

“You know you’re not supposed to have one of those. Strictly for—”

“Yeah, yeah, police business. But what’s the story?”

On the other end of the line, there was a long, heavy sigh and then the sound of scratching. “Something’s up,” he said. “But I ain’t sure what, exactly. The department has been weird lately, with the ignoring things, and feeding fake stories to the news, and—”

“Shut the front door,” Elena said, using her favorite fake swear. “Are you telling me this is some kind of departmental conspiracy? To cover up a pissed off bunny? Why the hell would they do that?”

Ralph scratched again, and then sighed in relief. “Allergies are horrible this year, what with the ragweed and the dogwoods. Just drives me crazy. What were you saying?”

“I was asking why you were revealing a nefariously evil ploy by the Jamesburg Police to... to what? What’s the point?”