Keeper of the Alphas - Complete (7 page)

Cami struggled for breath, wheezing as her throat constricted under the bear-man’s superhuman grasp. Her legs kicked for traction but she felt nothing but air underneath her bare feet.

He smiled as he watched her twist and writhe under his grip, an eerie, twisted smile. His eyes shimmered with an orange, luminescent sheen. Over one eye, a sliver of scar took out a slice of his eyebrow. “I’ve been waiting for this,” he growled, “for a very, very long time.”

Cami ripped her nails into his arms but he didn’t flinch. He yanked her closer and shoved his nose in her hair, taking a deep breath in. “You stink of your mother,” he said, his accent foreign, like he was talking with a mouth full of rusted nails. “You have her blood, but none of her strength.” His voice dropped low. “She fought hard before I ripped her throat out.”

Her eyes stung and she could feel a fire in her chest and in her dry throat. She wanted to scream, wanted to curse at him, but her head was getting light. “You remember the name Aldric,” he said. “The Beast who killed the Keepers of Tyburn.”

She felt her muscles start to weaken, like a puppet with the strings cut, but her heart worked double time to fight it, pounding hard in her chest.

Maybe she should just let go. Maybe…

(Not today, darling. Not like this.)

A loud, chilling roar scattered her thoughts. Her assailant’s head whipped around and she saw his mouth twist into a sneer. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it. A huge, angry grizzly bear. Nut-brown fur. Flashing eyes.

Wonderful.
Now she had two things to kill her. Cami squeaked and felt her eyes droop, lidding.

“The girl is mine,” the man hissed, and then threw her to the ground. Cami hit a tree and heard a crack. Her consciousness wavered and she fought to stay awake as she gasped through what felt like brambles and sticks scratching her throat.

Slumped bonelessly against the tree, she watched the naked man fall to all fours as his bones snapped and popped. Hair sprouted from his body, his nose extended into a snout and he roared—

Two full-grown grizzly bears faced each other now. The challenger was smaller, but he charged at the other with full force. They clashed like rocks, both solid and unwilling to budge. Teeth snapped, claws swiped, and they ripped fur and flesh from each other, tumbling around the ground.

The smaller bear fell hard, with the other on its back, teeth in its neck. The bear looked up at Cami, petrified on the ground, and roared loudly at her, a sound that shook her to the very bone. Like in her dreams, the roar woke her up and snapped her out of it. She caught the larger grizzly’s attention now, which lifted off its foe and began to amble back over to her. The other bear grabbed its neck in his strong jaws and forcibly yanked it back, away from Cami.

This was Cami’s chance. She jumped to her feet and bolted back inside the house. The couch was empty—where was Marcus when she needed him? In the back of her mind, she knew something her logic refused to accept. No time for that now. The sounds of animal fighting outside made her sick with fear—the growls, roars, yelps. She saw the car keys hanging from the mantel and snatched them up. She could go out the back, take the truck, and get out of here—

Or. She stopped halfway to the back door. Marcus’s rifle lay propped up on the couch.

(Get out, Cami. Run.)

The ruckus outside only got louder. Cami grabbed the rifle and carried it outside, kicking the door open.

From the porch, she had a good shot of both of them. Rolling around together, growling masses of fur and teeth and claws. Only she couldn’t see which bear had attacked her and which was…was…

Hell with it. Cami lifted the rifle in her arms and aimed it. She saw the bigger bear in her crosshairs. Saw a flash of orange eyes. They twisted and launched at one another. She gritted her teeth and pulled the trigger.

The kickback jerked the gun in her arms. One of the bears fell like a mountain. The other lifted its muddied snout, turned to her, and bared its teeth.

No. She cracked off another round but this one whizzed past the hulking animal. It sneered, but its ears flattened and it retreated, slinking back into the dark of the woods. The bushes rustled as it left, and then nothing.

And then silence. All Cami could hear was her own heartbeat, thudding wetly in her ears. Her ragged breaths. Crickets. Fireflies blinking on and off as they returned to their posts.

A groan. Her attention snapped back to the man—not a bear—now lying on the ground. Naked. Bleeding. Not just any man, either.

Marcus.

Cami dropped the rifle to the ground and dashed over to him. He was flat on his back, his jaw set in pain. Scrapes and scars aplenty ran down his body, and her bullet had sunk deep into his chest, leaving a raw, bloody hole in its wake.

“Oh God…I’m so sorry,” she said, frantically. “I didn’t know—”

“Help me up,” he grimaced.

She did her best to lift him gingerly so he could sit up, but that still tugged a guttural pained noise from the back of his throat. He eased himself up and half walked, half leaned against Cami for balance as she helped him to his feet and through the door. Not an easy task, dragging a mountain of a man, and he fumbled out of her grip and onto the couch.

“We’ve gotta get you to the hospital,” she said. Her voice was shaking. She didn’t do well in high-anxiety situations. Or bleeding people situations. Or bear situations.

He shook his head. “No doctors.” She flinched as Marcus shifted to prop himself up against the arm of the couch and growled through his pain. “There’s a…first aid kit. In the bathroom upstairs. Under the sink.” As Cami scampered off to grab it, she heard him bellow back at her, “And towels.”

She dashed up the stairs and pushed through the bathroom door, slamming into the sink in her haste. Cami fell to her knees and flung open the cabinet under the sink. She yanked out a hairdryer and cotton swabs to get to the red first aid kit shoved in the back. It had clearly suffered some wear and tear because when she grabbed it, the latch came undone and the contents spilled out.

Shit
. Cami grabbed the bandage, swabs and pair of tweezers off the bathroom floor and shoved them back in the kit. Was that bad? Would it need to be sterilized or something? Alcohol…that did the trick, right? Rubbing alcohol had to be in here, probably. But that stung like a bitch. Would he need painkillers? Or maybe he could take a couple anxiety meds from her stash to take the edge off. That’d work, right? Would that work? What was she doing?

What was she doing?

Cami’s frantic fingers came to a stop and she held them straight out in front of her. They were shaking. Bad.

This was a fit. She was having a psychotic break.

It was all this stress. Her mom. Back in Tyburn. She thought she was over the delusions, but she clearly wasn’t.

Seeing men turn into bears and bears turn into men. It was the same old story. When was she going to get her head right?

“Cami!” Marcus’s voice jolted her back in her body, hollering from downstairs. “I need you down here.”

Cami felt her blood tingle through her limbs as though waking them up. She didn’t have time to internally argue about what was or wasn’t real. A man was bleeding out because
she
pulled a trigger.

No time to count to ten. Get up.

Cami shoved everything back into the first aid kid and snatched it up, along with a handful of towels. By time she got back downstairs, the den was empty.

A stab of fear (were her delusions really getting that bad?) before she heard him growl, “Over here.”

Cami whipped around and saw him in the dining room, half-sitting on the table. Strands of hair fell in front of his eyes, but his silhouette was ripped, the bulky muscles in his arms straining to keep himself up.

She made a real effort not to drop her eyes.

“Right…sorry.” Cami moved into the dining room and dropped everything on the table. Marcus kept one hand close to his chest and used the other to shake out the towels and spread them across the table like low-budget tablecloths before he climbed up on it.

“I need tweezers,” he said.

“Tweezers, right…why?”

“The bullet needs to come out.” It was then that she noticed that the mark around the hole in his chest looked strange. Strange for a bullet hole. It had blackened and the veins around it were dark too, as though someone had injected ink into his bloodstream.

“What—?”

“Silver,” he said curtly. His breaths were labored and his sharp eyes met hers. “I know this is all very…strange, but I need you to focus right now. If it reaches my heart…well. Tweezers. And that bottle of whiskey.” He pointed.

Right
. Cami grabbed the tweezers and twisted around to snatch a bottle of whiskey off the bar. She brought both over to him and he took the whiskey first. He uncorked it with his teeth and took a glug. Priorities and all. Then he splashed the open bottle over the tweezers and let the whiskey drip onto one of the open towels. And then he took a breath and plunged the tweezers into his wound.

Marcus hissed through the pain as his fingers twisted the tweezers around. A new spout of blood trickled and made his fingers slippery. Cami watched him work it, her heart in her throat, but noticed his eyes begin to droop. He was fading, though trying to fight it, even as his fingers began to slow. His head hung as though suddenly sleepy and his body swayed.

“Whoa—” Cami leaned forward, catching Marcus before he pitched off the table. She eased him onto his back, on top of the white towels, spotted with his crimson blood.

His face was pale and he muttered, “I can…” But his tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth because his sentence faded. His eyes turned to Cami and…

There was a
pleading
there.

Cami wasn’t a doctor. Far from. Lynn had been the nurse. Working tireless hours at the hospital. Lynn would know what to do.

But Lynn wasn’t here. And Marcus was dying.

Cami swallowed back bile. “Okay,” she said shakily, and took the tweezers from his blood-soaked fingers. He let them go, relief softening his features. She tried to be careful about it and gently prodded the tweezers in, but all she could see was blood and black muscle. She took a breath and grabbed a towel, patting it over the wound to clean it out. When she pulled the towel back, she could
see
it, a shard of silver underneath living, breathing muscles.

(You can do this.)

She pushed the pointy end of the tweezers into his skin and pried back muscle. Marcus lurched on the table, suddenly alive with pain, and he grabbed the table and roared. Sounded inhuman and struck fear into Cami’s heart. So did the claws that suddenly shot from his nails and the sharp teeth that lengthened in his mouth as he bared them. His eyes darkened and, soon, she knew she’d have a full bear on her table to contend with.

Cami moved her free hand to his forehead and slipped her fingers through his hair. “Shhh,” she murmured, praying she sounded more confident than she felt. “Calm down…it’s going to be okay.”

The beast in him panted wildly, but his eyes connected with hers. The dark pigment in his irises lightened and, finally, the beast receded, his nails pulled back (leaving holes in the wood) and his teeth shortened again. Now he was just
Marcus
. With an apologetic look in his eyes.

“Alright…good,” she said, trying to sound encouraging. “Just like that. Stay with me.”

The look in his eyes said enough. She focused again on the silver in his chest, spreading.

In, out. Like a Band-Aid.

Cami dove the tweezers into his chest. She felt him tense, strain, but she worked it until—

The bullet popped out. Caked in blood, but
out
of him. No more silver. She picked it up between her fingers and twisted it around. Seemed so
small
. So incapable of causing so much damage. Seemed far too small, far too insignificant, to take a life, let alone a supernatural life.

She dropped the bullet and turned her attention back to Marcus. He was slipping in and out of consciousness on the table, moaning. She remembered something her mother said—or did—once, with a patient in the hospital (when “bring your daughter to work day” meant “let your daughter watch some sick people maybe-die”) and she grabbed a towel and pressed it against his chest. Staunched the bleeding. The wound still looked ugly and infected, with the edges around it dirt-black, dark spider veins running through his chest, but the bullet was out now. It wouldn’t reach his heart, whatever that meant. Silver. Guess the lore got some things right.

Never imagined she’d be
here
, though. Pressing a clean towel against the bullet wound of a werebear that was bleeding out on the kitchen table of her childhood home.

“Thank you,” was the last thing he managed to get out before he lost consciousness completely and passed out on the dining room table.

Cami bandaged Marcus up and wrapped the gauze tight around his chest to staunch the bleeding. Already, it was looking better. The ink black wasn’t spreading, at least. Still clung to the wound, though, looking diseased. She did all she could, put a towel over him to cover him up, and left him there to heal. She cleaned the bullet and meant to leave it beside him (some “I survived and all I got was this stupid bullet” souvenir), but on second thought, she stuck it in her pocket. Some small, irrefutable proof that this wasn’t a delusion or a nightmare; this was something that happened in the real, physical world.

Then she stripped off her bloody dress, flicked on the shower, and sank down in it and cradled herself, holding her legs.