Bear This Heat (A BBW Shifter Romance) (Last of the Shapeshifters) (17 page)

“Change,” he ordered, blood dripping from his nose and his split lip. “Change back.” The wolf did not respond, and so he hit it again, and again, thumping his fist against the wolf over and over.

The wolf halted all protest then, and Dylan let go of the snout, and backed away. “I only want to talk.”

He watched as the wolf rolled onto his legs, and, trembling from injury, rose to its feet. He realized, then, that he had made a mistake. The wolf growled at him, ferocious, angry, full of hatred, and Dylan knew it had been a feint all along.

He dropped into a squat, intending to start the shift, but he was too late. The wolf pounced. Time slowed. Dylan saw the great lupine body, stretched out like a hurdler’s, teeth glistening in reflected moonlight. The yellow eyes were fogged, filled with a violence that he could not understand.

Dylan shut his eyes. There was no time to do anything. There was no time to react. But an earsplitting shriek of pain filled the air around him, and he opened his eyes to see Sasha’s car rumbling past him, and the wolf, caught mid-jump, flinging off high into the sky, body loose like a ragdoll, and blood showering the already red desert sand.

He closed his eyes again, and shook his head. Sasha had killed the only other shapeshifter he knew of.

*

“Are you okay?” Sasha asked, climbing out of the car. She ran to Dylan, bleeding and bruised, and helped him to his feet.

“Why did you hit him so hard?”

“What? He was going to kill you!”

“Maybe,” Dylan said. “I hope you haven’t killed him.” He looked at his body, seemed to do a mental check to see if he could still feel everything and move everything, and then he looked at her. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Sasha said. “I was wearing my seatbelt.” She walked up to him, held his jaw in her hand. “You need stitches.”

“I think he cut open my back,” Dylan said, and he turned, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder. Sasha put her hand to her mouth. She could see bits of backbone, and Dylan was bleeding profusely.

“Fuck!” she cried, running back to the car and grabbing his shirt from the front seat. He ambled back toward her, and she pressed it against the open wound on his back. Dylan inhaled sharply, but did not complain.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “We clot faster.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“What, are shapeshifters super-human, too?”

“If there was such a thing,” he replied. “Come on, we need to check on him.” He lurched off after the body of the wolf, and Sasha followed him, looking back at her bonnet quickly. The metal had crumpled and dented due to the force of the hit. Superintendent O’Neill was not going to like that, even though it was the crappiest unmarked car the station owned.

Following Dylan, she came across not the body of a wolf, but a man. He was huge, hulking, and so thick in the middle he looked like a beastly power-lifter.

From the way his body was lying, it was fairly obvious that he needed to get to a hospital, if he was even still alive. She took her hand off her sidearm, knowing it wouldn’t be necessary. Both of the man’s legs were broken, and in more places than one. They lay at gag-inducing angles that made her turn away.

“Damn,” Dylan said. “You really messed him up.” She looked over her shoulder and watched as he lowered his ears to the man’s mouth, and then looked up at her. “He’s still alive, though. Don’t think he’ll ever walk again, though.”

Sasha thought of something. “Does it affect your shift?”

“Does what?”

“Like, if you’ve got a broken bone and you shift? Does it fix it?”

“I don’t know. Good question, though. I’ve never been this banged up. Don’t know that I’d like to experiment.”

“Yeah.”

“Come on,” Dylan said. He stooped down as though to try and pick up the massive man.

“No!” Sasha cried, putting her hands out. “Don’t touch him.”

“Why?”

“You don’t know if his neck is broken or what. You can’t move somebody like this, you can sever the spinal cord. Come on, this is basic shit, Dylan. We need to call the ambulance.”

“Where do we tell them we are?”

“I’m a police officer, remember?” Sasha said, and she turned and jogged back to her car. “My radio’s got GPS in it!”

*

Interviewer: Did you know at the time what Marcus wanted all shapeshifters dead?

Dylan: No.

Interviewer: Were you shocked when you found out?

Dylan: Of course I was. That he would kill for no reason other than the fact we were…

Interviewer: Shapeshifters?

Dylan: Yeah.

Interviewer: So who first told you about Marcus, and the kind of person he was?

Dylan: [Laughs.] He did. [Points.] But to be completely honest, when I first bumped into him, I thought I was in for another fight.

- Excerpt from full transcript of
Interview with a Shapeshifter
by Circe Cole. Printed with expressed permission.

*

“Yeah, you’ll definitely need stiches. But there’s no need for corrective surgery. You’re actually very lucky, you know. Not just that your spinal cord wasn’t damaged at all, but that you had someone there to help stop the bleeding.”

Dylan winced as the young male nurse cleaned his wounds. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

“How did this happen, anyway? It looks unusual. Did he bite you? These look a little like tooth punctures.”

“I don’t know,” Dylan lied.

The nurse sounded unconvinced. “Right. Well, anyway, we’re going to need to prep you, so I’ll be back with a gown. You need to undress.”

Dylan looked toward Sasha, who was sat on an empty bed opposite him, evidently lost in thought. She was fingering the keys to her handcuffs that she’d ordered the doctors to use to restrain Marcus to the operating table. She had insisted, even when they told her there was no way he would wake up from the anesthetic.

She only had to tell them that he was responsible for the two wounded officers that came in earlier, and that he did that with his bare hands. The doctors had agreed to keep him restrained to something as much as they could.

Dylan wanted to ask her what she thought handcuffs would do. If he shifted, his wolf’s paw would easily slip out. But he didn’t, not just because there were others around now, but because it had seemed a symbolic gesture, something that helped Sasha.

After all, this was her man, her prisoner. More than that, he represented something new and chaotic that she could not control. Though just a guess, Dylan was pretty sure that now everything had slowed down, now that there was no more fighting and ramming with cars, Sasha’s brain was starting to go through the process of understanding shapeshifters, of parsing them into her worldview.

Dylan wondered if it was difficult for her. She seemed resilient, open-minded, and it didn’t look like the sort of thing that would make her either retreat into denial, nor mania. “You alright?” he asked. She turned to look at him, but her stare was vacant.

“Just thinking… what to do about him.” She gestured upward with her head, and Dylan guessed that was where the operating theater was.

“You’ll need to, you know, make sure your department knows he’s very dangerous.”

“I know.”

“I mean, armed supervision.”

Sasha lowered her voice. “What’s to stop him from shifting?”

“Nothing, I suppose,” Liam said. “But I think he’s pretty old. Lived a long time. He called me a cub, and I’m eighty.”

“What’s your point?”

“I mean,” Dylan said. He put out an arm, gesturing her to come to him, but she hesitated. “Come on,” he said.

“You don’t look as good anymore, with all those cuts on your face.”

“They’ll heal.”

“Maybe I don’t like scars.”

“You’ll learn to.” He smiled at her, arm still outstretched. A feeling came over him, like the ground was falling away, and he was waiting for someone to take his hand and pull him to safety. It scared him. But the waking nightmare of emotion was quashed when she stepped forward and took his hand, running hers up his arm, and sitting down beside him.

“You mean what?”

“Well if he’s old, obviously he doesn’t shift in front of people. Otherwise, surely someone would know by now. I mean, unless he absolutely has to, like today with the police.”

“They had him cornered,” Sasha agreed.

“Yeah. I mean, otherwise people would know, right?”

“Makes sense.”

Dylan paused before asking, “There something on your mind?”

“No,” Sasha replied, sighing. She looked at him, and touched his jaw. “It’s just been a long day. A lot to think about.”

*

“All done?” Sasha asked. She saw Dylan walking toward her, still wearing his blood-stained t-shirt. She’d used it to stop the bleeding on his back, but with no other clothes in the car, he had to put it on.

“Yeah,” he said. “Said I don’t need to spend any time here. They keep calling me lucky.”

“You don’t think you were?”

“I don’t mean it like that,” he said, shaking his head at her. “I do think I’m lucky.”

“You could’ve died tonight, you know. Think about it.”

He walked up to her, and put an arm around her shoulder. Sasha expected to have an impulse to shrug it off her, but the gesture instead kicked up a storm of emotion inside her. She almost wanted to cry. He must have sensed it, because he hugged her tightly.

“I really fucked that guy up bad,” she said into his shoulder. “What a crazy day. I mean, what if he dies?”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I
know
that,” she said. “I don’t know. I’m tired. I want to go home.”

He didn’t say anything then, and the unasked question hung in the air over them. But he asked it eventually.

“Can I come home with you?”

Sasha nodded slowly. “Fine. You’ll need help washing that wound, anyway.”

“I can do it myself.”

“It’s not like I want to do it, Dylan.” She pushed backward, her eyes glistening. “And you’re sleeping on a towel tonight. I don’t want you suddenly bleeding or leaking puss into my sheets. Yuck!”

“Your sheets? I thought you might put me in the spare room,” he said, grinning.

“I am. Those sheets still belong to me. We’re going to have to take a taxi, too. My car’s still at the station.”

“Do you need to check in?”

“I already did, while you were getting patched up.”

“What did they say?”

“Not much. We’ll both have to give statements tomorrow. They’ll ask you a load of questions. We need to talk about what to do.”

“Okay.”

“That’s the only reason I’m inviting you over, by the way,” she added.

“Got it.”

Interviewer: You were suspended, weren’t you?

Sasha: Yes. Two weeks.

Interview: What for, exactly?

Sasha: Oh, I can’t remember exactly what it all was. But it suited me fine, actually. I had some leave saved up and so I took it after the two weeks, too. There needed to be a cool-down period, you know? I mean, two officers injured by the guy who was my killer? Yeah, there needed to be some break-time… for me, and for the station.

Interviewer: So how long until Marcus woke up?

Sasha: Oh, it was ten days, I think. [Looks at Dylan.] Ten?

Dylan: Yeah. Something like that.

Interviewer: Was it difficult for you, having to wait so long before you could question him?

Sasha: A little.

Interviewer: Only a little? Didn’t you want to find out everything you could?

Sasha: Well, Dylan and I actually went on couple of dates. We sort of tried to forget about it and get to know each other.

Dylan: Yeah. That was an odd little bit of normalcy amidst it all, wasn’t it? Especially for you. Just finding out shapeshifters exist, and then we’re eating spaghetti and talking about our childhoods and favorite colors.

Sasha: [Laughs.] Yeah. To tell you the truth, I was a little distracted the whole time.

Dylan: As I later found out.

Interviewer: Did you ever suspect that there were some kind of connection between you two?

Dylan: I did. I think she did, too.

Sasha: Yeah. When I looked back on it over those few days before we talked to Marcus in the hospital, it just seemed the inevitable conclusion, you know?

Dylan: Yeah. The way we were brought together. Her promotion. That I even managed to track Marcus there. And then, of course, when we met. I think I might have suspected it first then, even if I didn’t know it, you know?

Sasha: For me, it was when I agreed to go to dinner with you. I don’t even know why I did that.

Interviewer: Now that you two are where you are, you know?

Dylan: Yeah.

Interviewer: Is it more obvious, looking back?

Dylan: Of course! And when it was all explained to me by this lot here [Gestures at the rest of the group.], it seemed crazy that I missed so many of the signs. I thought about it for a long time, trying to spot things. I started trying to analyze everything.