Page 23 of A Bear's Mercy

There was something she wouldn’t tell him. Whatever she was really doing there, it wasn’t just information gathering, like she wanted them to believe. He turned the lion over in his hands, holding in it one and considering where the next cut was going to be.

“At least, that’s what they told me,” she said. “They picked me because I had the most experience with shifters, growing up with them and all. Though there weren’t many wolves or grizzlies in Cumberland. Lots of lions and foxes.”

She spun the mug between her fingers, the ceramic thumping against the wood.

“They told me Kade was feral,” she said, suddenly.

Daniel cut a small chunk of wood away from the lion’s tail. It wasn’t the farthest thing from the truth that he’d ever heard. The other man certainly didn’t have a lot of human graces, that much was for sure.

“That’s not hard to disprove,” Daniel said. The knife hovered over the wooden lion and he looked up at Charlie. “He forgets to wear clothes a lot, but he’s sure not feral.”

Charlie shook her head. “I wish I knew why they told me that,” she said, slowly. “Whether it was an honest mistake or something else.”

“He spends a lot of time as a bear,” Daniel said. “That’s his job, after all.”

“What is?”

Daniel looked up.

“He tracks down feral shifters,” he said.

Charlie blinked. “That’s a job?” she asked.

“Sure,” Daniel said. “Can’t have a bunch of smart, deranged bears and wolves and lions roaming the countryside.”

“I didn’t know there were other shifters who... did that.”

“Who better?”

Charlie slumped a little in her chair but straightened immediately, sucking in a breath through her teeth, pain flashing across her face.

Daniel half-stood, dropping his tools on the table, ready to do anything she needed.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just moved funny is all.”

She went quiet for a long time.

“So he saves other shifters from being feral,” she mused, talking almost to herself. “Wolves, too?”

“I think most of his work is bears, but he’ll take on anyone.” Daniel cut another chunk off the lion, slowly freeing the wooden animal from its prison. “Last year he caught and helped an eagle for the first time. It was terrorizing people’s pets. We were afraid it was going to start going after babies.”

Charlie paled a little.

“Babies? Why would it do that?”

Daniel licked his lips and very, very carefully positioned the knife along the lion’s jaws, delicately cutting away the wood to reveal its snarling fangs.

“When you’re feral, some really fucked up things make sense,” he told her. He couldn’t look her in the eye, so he just stared into the eyes of the lion, his knife resting on one of its teeth. “Your human brain starts to fuse with your animal brain, and you have these urges that you can’t understand, but they’re so powerful that you act on them anyway. But you don’t know how anymore.”

He had a fuzzy memory of a shack in the middle of nowhere, burning down. Then the sound of sirens, then him hightailing it into the woods.

Daniel swallowed, pushing the memory back into the box where it belonged.

“So all you can do is destroy things you used to love.”

Like the house where you grew up, he thought.

Finally, he looked up. Charlie’s mouth was slightly open and she was staring at him.

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