Page 103 of Corbin
Lifting her nose, she sniffed for wolf scent mixed in with the aroma of stew being cooked in a nearby tavern and the smoky tinge of burning logs. She trusted her extremely sharp sense of smell over any other sense. Nothing yet.
The waiting was nerve-racking.
She was not known for her patience.
Maybe she shouldn’t have run across the tops of two buildings, then shimmied down the water drain and through a small window into a ladies’ bathroom that opened into a bar and ... she smiled at the obstacle course they’d been forced to take to follow her.
She knew this town inside and out.
They were the outsiders.
A tabby cat stalked by, explaining the noise. If it looked her way, the cat would see only a dark figure, if anything. Elianna still wore a navy-blue rag tied around her cinnamon-colored hair, hallmark of being the bastard in her mother’s family of polar bear shifters. Her hair was only one difference between her and others in a polar bear clan that possessed shades of blonde hair and eyes so dark brown they looked black.
Once the polar bears had seen Elianna’s mixed-blood bear, it hadn’t taken long for them to boot Elianna and her mother from their clan fifteen hundred miles north of here.
Among the bear shifters inthistown, her pale-blue eyes marked her as not belonging to her father’s clan.
She missed living in her first home, a cold wilderness where, as a child, she had survived on the land and faced few real threats.
Miss fish. Eat fish. Swim.
Of course. Her bear says nothing about being threatened by wolves, but let Elianna make the mistake of reminiscing, and her bear starts whining.
Speaking to her bear with her mind, Elianna said,Please sleep. I fight bad wolves. No interfere.She’d been speaking to her bear in English for a while now, but still added,Understand?
Her bear grumbled and pushed at her, but settled down, which was as much acknowledgment as Elianna would get.
Twice a month, she shifted into her animal abomination to allow the bear freedom to run in a remote section of the mountains west of the city.
After a last, half-hearted snarl, the bear ignored her.
They had a relationship of tolerance. It was unlike those of other shifters who actually enjoyed friendships with their animals, but it worked.
Elianna accepted half the fault for the wall between them, but who could blame her? Should she be happy to have a bear inside of her that her own clan found disgusting? Her father had never even tried to meet her, and her mother had refused to share much about him.
Ironic, considering the fifteen hundred miles through rugged mountains her mother had forced Elianna to travel to be close to the man she wanted as her mate.
But he already had a mate.
Small details often escaped her mother.
Like humiliating a wolf shifter.
Elianna and her half-breed bear would forever be outcasts here. She had to find a way out of here with Nico.
Swim, swim, swim. Eat fish, her bear grumbled.
No, Elianna replied.Go sleep.
No fair.
“Life not fair,” Elianna muttered softly. She studied everything she could about life outside Russia, always preparing for any chance to leave a land where she no longer felt welcome. In Canada, she could vanish with Nico into the wilderness. She needed no clan and no man. As a bear shifter, she wouldnever have a life in PK, the name locals used for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
She refused to turn twenty-three in this place.
Of course, losing to the wolves would take future birthday concerns off the table.
Her thumping heart could handle the demand of running through knee-deep snow and scrambling over boulders to outrun her enemy, but it couldn’t take anything happening to Nico. He might not be her blood brother, but he was hers to protect.
