Gray Back Ghost Bear

GRAY BACK GHOST BEAR

(GRAY BACK BEARS, BOOK 3)

By T. S. JOYCE

This book was not written as a standalone.

The author recommends to read these stories in order for optimal reader enjoyment.

Gray Back Bad Bear (
Book 1
)

Gray Back Alpha Bear (
Book 2
)

Gray Back Broken Bear (Coming Soon)

Copyright © 2015 by T. S. Joyce

Copyright © 2015, T. S. Joyce

First electronic publication: August 2015

T. S. Joyce

www.tsjoycewrites.wordpress.com

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental. The author does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

Published in the United States of America

Good for them.

Jason Trager climbed down from the treehouse and watched his alpha, Creed, and his new mate Gia walk toward the Grayland Mobile Park, hand in hand. He couldn’t take his eyes off their entwined fingers as they talked and joked with the other Gray Backs.

Damn, he wished he and Tessa had managed even a fraction of the respect Creed and Gia had for each other. Things sure would’ve worked out differently.
Tessa.
Jason snarled his lip and ripped his gaze away from Creed and Gia’s clasped hands. Not everyone who found a mate got the happy ending. He would know. His ending was a life of loneliness and a crew of blood-thirsty, broken Gray Backs.

“Man, I’m leaving this place,” Clinton muttered beside him.

He always threatened that, so Jason ignored the half-assed threat and sauntered around a jagged tree stump. The poor pine had probably been a casualty of Beaston dragging his singlewide up the trail and into the woods to avoid living with the rest of the crew.

Clinton spat on a pile of leaves. “I’m serious this time. Willa and Gia are awesome, but you saw what women did to the Ashe Crew.”

Jason sighed and glared at Clinton whose blond brows were jacked up with seriousness.

“We’ll all be mated in a year,” Clinton said, blue eyes gone round. “It was one thing having Willa come into the crew, but now Gia? I’m calling it now. If I stay here, I’m as good as whipped.”

“Then leave,” Jason said. “See who will take you.”

“Harrison would take me.”

“You gonna be a tree cutter now, Clinton? You gonna be a Boarlander? You gonna abandon Creed who took you in when no one else would?”

Easton appeared out of the trees like an apparition, green eyes eerie and glowing as he walked beside them. “Harrison will kill you as soon as he finds out how fucked in the head you are, Clinton. So go ahead and leave. Maybe I’d go to your funeral.”

“You would?” Clinton asked in a shocked tone.

“No.” Easton jogged back into the woods and disappeared behind an old spruce.

Jason laughed. Easton was bat-guano crazy, but it was funny watching Clinton get all choked up about him going to his funeral.

Clinton shoved Jason in the shoulder and stomped off in the direction of his trailer. “Asshole,” he muttered.

Jason made a shocked sound in his throat. “I’m an asshole? Easton just talked about Harrison killing you, but he doesn’t get in trouble?”

“He doesn’t know any better!” Clinton yelled right before the screen door to his trailer slammed loudly behind him.

That right there was bull crap at its finest because Jason would bet his chainsaw that Easton knew a lot more than anyone gave him credit for.

With a deep rattling growl in his throat, he tromped from the dirt path to the white gravel that surrounded their semi-circle of trailers. Clinton had been a pissy dick on and off since Willa had been Turned but, damn, couldn’t he just let them have a good, drama-free hour? This was the problem with the Gray Backs. They’d had this cool moment in the treehouse Easton had built for the cub Gia was carrying in her belly, and they’d all been getting along great, happy that Creed and Matt had come home after a couple of days in Louisiana with their mates. Everything was great, but Gray Backs had a tendency to stomp on good moods. Easton with his death speech and Clinton with his “mantrum,” as Willa called them. Now, Jason’s mood was headed nowhere good.

He made a ticking sound behind his teeth as he threw the door to his trailer open and headed straight for the fridge. This morning at the landing before Creed and Matt returned had sucked as he tried to keep from killing Easton, who picked a fight every thirty seconds in order for his inner beast to claim fourth in the crew. Jason didn’t even care! He’d already told Easton he could be fourth in the crew because, hell on earth, it wasn’t like they were fighting for second. Easton was challenging him for one of the lowest ranks. It didn’t make any damned sense, and Jason didn’t care where he ranked. All he cared about was keeping his bear sane today, tomorrow, and the next day, too, if he was lucky enough.

He’d managed to survive a couple of days on the landing without Creed or Matt there to break up the fights, but it had been close. And when Creed had come back home and the crew had been reunited again, dang it all, that had been an awesome reunion. And he’d been mooning over how happy he was for Creed, finding a woman who was his perfect match, and then Clinton had to go and ruin his happy thoughts.

Jason threw open the refrigerator and yanked a beer out of the front. With a
clink
, he popped the cap and dropped it on the floor like a slob—because Tessa had hated that, and he found pleasure in doing things that would’ve pissed off his late mate.

She Turned you, and then she left you.

The thought brought a chill up his neck like snow being dumped into the back of his jacket. His arm hairs stood on end, and his scalp itched with instinct. Inside, his bear snarled a warning.

He swallowed his gulp of cold beer and slid a glance over his shoulder.

Yep, there she was.

“Hey, baby,” Tessa said from her seat on the other side of his two-person dining table. “Did you miss me?”

“What are you doing here?” he gritted out, closing the refrigerator door so he could lean on it casually and pretend he wasn’t staying as far away from her as possible.

“You know what I’m doing here, lover. I’m here because you want me to be.”

“No.” Jason shook his head slowly. “I really don’t.”

Tessa’s copper-colored hair twitched with her empty laugh, and her hazel eyes turned icy. “Liar.” She tapped her forehead. “I can hear your lies. I always knew you best, baby.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Tessa leaned back in her chair and angled her head. She looked predatory with her hard eyes, but then he couldn’t remember her ever looking soft.

“Poor Jason, living with all this guilt. Living in a bachelor crew of crazies and destined to die at his alpha’s hand. Or claw, I should say.” She lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. “A murderer deserves nothing less.”

“Fuck off, Tessa.” Jason gripped the neck of his beer in a strangle hold and headed for the door. He didn’t have to listen to this again.

“You don’t leave until I tell you to leave! Walk out that door, and I’ll come after you. Then what will your precious Gray Backs think when they see you talking to the air? Hmm? What will Creed think when he sees how crazy you really are? Murderer.”

The word brushed across his ears like a frosty wind, and he stopped in his tracks, just in front of the door. “Stop it.”

“Murderer.”

“You left me!” Jason yelled as he turned on her. “You left me for him. You weren’t mine to protect anymore!”

Tessa screamed a blood-curdling sound, her mouth opening wider and wider as her skin melted away from her face. Flesh gave way to muscle, which gave way to blood and bone, and then Tessa was nothing but ash. And then she was nothing at all.

Jason squatted down and covered his ears as the scream faded away.

He was no murderer, but that didn’t stop the haunting.

He’d let his mate down, and now Tessa was caught in the in-between, trapped by the veil that stood between this world and the next.

His mate was dead, but not gone—never gone.

Tessa Trager, his maker, was now his own personal ghost bear.

She could do this. Georgia was a self-sufficient, outdoorsy, gun-toting, poacher-hunting renegade park ranger descended from a long line of tough-as-steel Ames women. Cattle-women, peacekeepers, and single moms dotted her female heritage, so why was she stopped on the side of the road steadying her hands before she drove the last straightaway into the Grayland Mobile Park?

Because of bear shifters, that’s why.

She wasn’t afraid of much, but she was definitely afraid of bears. Grizzlies to be precise, and her trepidation came from a year-long internship in Alaska assisting a game warden near Kodiak. Now, Kodiak bears were gnarly, gigantic, aggressive animals made entirely of weapons. They were able to smite out a puny human with one slap of their ferocious claws, and here she was about to willingly drive into a camp of registered, real-life bear shifters. She’d sworn up and down after Alaska she would never work around brown bears again. Only koala bears, or little sun bears, or for freak’s sake, black bears sounded like a walk in the park after what she’d seen on Kodiak Island. Yet, she was about to introduce herself to a lumberjack crew of notoriously aggressive grizzly shifters.

They lived way out here in the wilds of Wyoming for a reason. Likely, they didn’t dig visitors, but this was part of the territory she’d signed on to protect, and she wasn’t going to let her boss, Damon Daye, down by pussyfooting around the bear shifters who inhabited the area. Her success as a ranger here depended on a good, professional working relationship with these people-beasts. And dang it all, these jobs were hard to land, and she was ready to settle down somewhere for longer than a year. Her fear of bears was standing in the way of making a home, and she needed to get over it. Fast.

She popped down the visor mirror and studied her pallid complexion. God, she even looked scared right now. She sniffed herself, but she smelled the same way she always did. Powder fresh deodorant and the hair product she used to define her curls, because goodness knows, she needed all the help she could get with her wild sandy-colored mane. Bears could smell things regular people couldn’t, though, and right this very moment, she probably smelled like terror and didn’t even know it.

Be the lion, not the gazelle.

She narrowed her eyes and let off a growl, then slammed the mirror closed. She could do this. She was a park ranger, and she was a badass.

Lead foot on the gas of her old, beat-up Jeep Wrangler, she blasted down the dirt road toward the trailer park. It was November, so the chilly air that blew through her open windows stung her hands as she gripped the steering wheel. She’d have to button up the old Jeep for winter soon.

A wooden sign hung over the white gravel road. Someone with an eye for detail had carved
Grayland Mobile Park
into the rustic sign in perfectly spaced block letters. And as she passed under it and got her first glimpse of the trailer park, she huffed a surprised laugh. This wasn’t like the one she’d grown up in. Five trailers sat in a semi-circle around a large, communal fire pit. Four of them had new roofs and fine shingles down the side of them, giving them a cabin feel. The one on the left side, though… Now, that one felt more familiar. It was dilapidated and old. The cream paint was chipping, and the green shutters had seen better days. Even the house number, 1010, was lopsided and barely hanging on. If she ignored the sprawling porch off to the side, it looked a lot like the singlewide she’d lived in until she was eighteen. The mountains behind the park blocked the sinking sun, and shadows stretched across the patch of grass she had parked her Jeep in. Georgia cut the engine. It would be dark soon, and she mentally choked herself for stalling so long to come up here.

A man walked out of one of the middle trailers, the screen door banging loudly behind him as he jogged down the stairs with a large plate of raw steaks. Did bear shifters eat raw meat? She should’ve researched them more. She tracked his short journey to the communal fire pit. The man was very handsome. Short, dark hair matched his chocolate-colored eyes. His face was clean-shaven and his cheekbones sharp, so it was easy to see he was talking to himself, or perhaps singing too low for her to hear. He was tall, but not as brawny as she’d imagined bear shifters would be. She’d expected hairy, bulky men, but this one wasn’t like that at all. On closer inspection, the sloping curves of his defined arm muscles pressed hard against the gray, thin, long-sleeved shirt he wore over his medium-wash blue jeans. And the way his waist tapered inward made his shoulders look much broader.

He opened a grill that was bricked in near the fire pit and jammed a spatula into the air, then said something sharp to the space beside him. Who was he talking to? And if he was a shifter, why hadn’t he used his animal senses to notice she was here? Perhaps their hearing and instincts weren’t as good as the Kodiak bears she’d dealt with.

Georgia pushed open her door, ignoring the hairs that were rising on the back of her neck. She had a gun. She was safe.

The man spun so fast he blurred, and those eyes she’d thought had been dark were suddenly as silver as the back of a minnow. “What the fuck?” he snarled out.

Lovely. And terrifying because his voice didn’t sound entirely human.

But when his silver eyes locked dead center on hers, she gasped and froze. He looked…not familiar exactly, but not like a stranger either. His face took on the slack look she probably wore right now. His dark eyebrows relaxed out of their frown, and his clenched jaw eased open. His breath hitched as he straightened his spine and narrowed his blazing eyes. “Who are you?”

She swallowed hard once, then twice, stalling so her voice wouldn’t come out shaky and scared when she spoke. She cleared her throat and approached him slowly. “I’m Georgia Ames.”

The man backed up a step, so she locked her legs against any further forward momentum. She was going to offer her hand for a shake, but maybe bear shifters didn’t like touch. Or maybe they greeted each other differently than humans did, she didn’t know.

The man jerked his attention to the space beside him he’d been talking to earlier and looked around as if he were searching for someone. With a baffled look on his face, he scanned the entire trailer park before his eyes landed back on her. He studied her uniform.

“You some kind of game warden? We don’t poach here. Anything we hunt, we do in season and we buy licenses.”

“No. Yes.” She cleared her throat again and tried to steady her unraveling nerves. “I’m a park ranger hired by Damon Daye to watch over his mountains, but I’ll be serving as a type of game warden, too. He’s been having some poaching problems.”

“I already told you. We don’t poach.”

“No, I’m not accusing you. I’m just here to introduce myself. I’ll be working all over this place and didn’t want you and your…people…to think I was trespassing. I’m going over to meet the other lumberjack clans tomorrow.”

“Crews.”

“I’m sorry?”

The man looked around again with a troubled expression. “We’re called crews, not clans.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

The silence grew awkward as they stared at each other in the waning evening light.

The man shifted his weight from side to side and twitched his head toward the mountains. “My alpha and crew are almost here if you want to stay and meet them. Today is my day off. Their shift is done, so they’re headed home right now. It’s not safe for you to come up in these mountains unannounced from here on, though. It’s different with the Boarlanders and Ashe Crew. Gray Backs don’t deal with surprise visits from women as well.” The man scratched the back of his neck and shook his head. “Or visits from anyone for that matter.”

“Who were you talking to earlier?” Georgia blurted out. The fierce look on his face made her wish she could swallow those words back down, but they were out there now. Shoot.

“Nobody.” The man’s narrowed eyes began to fade to the dark, human color again as he dragged his gaze down her body and back up with a thoughtful expression. “You want to stay for dinner?”

“Are you going to point that spatula at me the whole time?”

The man looked down at his weapon of choice and dropped it to his side. “Sorry.”

“And you never told me your name, so I feel weird about staying for dinner with a complete stranger.”

“Lady, this ain’t a date.”

Georgia gulped. “Of course…” She pursed her lips as heat blazed up her neck. “I didn’t… Maybe I should go and come back tomorrow to meet everyone.” She was backing away slowly as mortification pitched her voice up an octave. “It was rude of me to show up right at dinner time.”

“Jason. Jason Trager. Now I’m not a stranger, so you can eat with us.”

“Oh, I don’t eat raw meat, anyway.”

Jason snorted. “Neither do I, Ranger. You just snuck up on me before I started cooking.”

“Oh.” More blushing. More mortification, and all she wanted to do was flee. Not only because she was losing all semblance of professionalism with this man, but he was so intimidatingly attractive and was staring at her so directly, her tongue felt like it was tripping over itself every time she spoke. Spending an entire meal with him was an infinitely bad idea.

Jason canted his head. “You smell strange. Not scared, but something like that. Do I frighten you?”

“Bears frighten me.” Shoot again. Why had she blurted that out?
Stupid mouth shut up.

The corner of his lips lifted slowly in a crooked grin, and she imagined her ovaries were exploding like fireworks.

“Good,” he said in a deep tenor. “You should be.” He gestured to a plastic chair near the grill and gave her his back.

Georgia squeezed her eyes tightly closed and wished she could think up a good enough excuse to bow out of dinner. Nothing came to mind, though, so she was trapped with the scary, sexy bear-man. She zipped up her dark brown puff jacket and sank to the edge of the chair as Jason turned on the grill.

Even from here, she could feel something powerful rolling off him. Some electric current that filled the space between them. Jason kept his face carefully turned away from her as he set the steaks on the grill.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” she asked.

Jason shot her a suspicious glare and walked away. Okaaay. He was gone for a few minutes, but came back with a couple of beers and a plate of corn and asparagus on foil. He popped the top on one of the drinks and let the cap fall to the ground. He handed the bottle to her before doing the same to his.

“Thanks,” she said on a breath. The nerves were back, all fluttering around in her stomach like a hive of angry bees.

After taking a long sip from the cold glass bottle, she snuggled deeper into her jacket.

“You cold?” Jason asked gruffly without looking at her.

“Uh, a little. I think.”

“You think?”

“I have chills, but maybe it’s because…you’re…” Aw, friggin’ A, her mouth had a mind of its own.

“I’m what?”

Bone-deep terrifying. “Intimidating.” The last of the word wrenched up an octave, and her lion status plummeted to field mouse.

“Hmm,” he rumbled, the sound more a growl than a human word.

Another chill blasted across her skin despite her thick coat.

“Where are you from, Ranger?” Jason asked as he checked the underside of one of the steaks.

“All over. I grew up in Big Canoe, Georgia, though. I moved away from there when I was eighteen and spent a year in Montana, then a year in South Carolina, then Alaska, then another year in Texas, and oh my gosh, you can tell me to stop talking at any time. I’m a rambler, Mr. Trager.”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he wasn’t even listening. He just kept sipping his beer and checking the food as if she wasn’t even there. Okay then.

“It’s just I don’t go on a lot of social calls, and I’m new in town, and I’ve never met a bear shifter. I’m camped out at a ranger station Mr. Daye set up, but I don’t know anyone yet, and I was hoping to make a good impression on you and your clan. Your crew! Sorry.”

“Damon Daye hired you?” Ah, so he
was
listening.

“Yes. Some animals were shot illegally on his property, so he put out an ad. It took me two weeks of phone interviews to land this job.”

Jason slid her a thoughtful look and nodded his head. “Congrats.” He leaned over and clinked his bottle against hers.

She smiled and ducked her chin so he wouldn’t see the heat in her cheeks. Then she took another swallow. “Thanks.” She bobbed her head back and forth and admitted, “You’re the first person to congratulate me.”

“So your name is Georgia and you’re from Georgia. Who made that decision?”

“My dad.” Before he went to prison. He gave her a name and then busted on out of her life because he couldn’t seem to stop robbing liquor stores like a super-winner. “He wasn’t the brightest apple of the bunch.”

“Mmm. Well, I like your name.”

“You do?” God, why did she sound like a teen with a crush? “I mean, you do. Because my name is awesome.” And she didn’t need the approval of some bear shifter—sexy or not.

Jason flipped the steaks, then shut the grill. He leaned on a sturdy table, one arm locked, the other gripping the neck of his beer. His leg was crossed over the other, and he looked like the epitome of confident male as he lifted his chin and studied her.