Page 16 of Grumpy Special Ops Bear: Ep. 1
Just a few years back, a run-in with humans had shown me how precarious our lives were. A soldier had captured a member of my clan near a military base in the mountains. The soldiers hadn’t known what to do with the man, who had been a bear only moments before. The clan had been in an uproar and ready to charge the base to get our brother back. However, I’d sworn to get him back peacefully, if possible.
I had gone to the base, walking right up to the main road as a bear. As I’d gotten closer, I’d shifted into a naked man. At first, the soldiers had been prepared to shoot me, but the man in charge, General Harry Taggert, had stopped them. He’d come out against the protests of his men and greeted me.
Together, we’d come to an arrangement that only men on that base would know about.
With Cutter, who was my second-in-command and beta, and Grant, who was my head enforcer, we had become part of a special task force, a band of brothers, completing missions for the US government under the most top secret conditions they could manage. General Taggert had sworn to keep our existence confidential, and he’d released my clan member.
Ever since then, I’d been going to the base every few weeks. My clan didn’t trust the general even though I did.
In the beginning, I’d worried he’d go back on his word. I’d feared the government would raid my clan’s lands, take my family away for dissection. But General Taggert never revealed to anyone that he had shifters working for him.
In the end, he’d turned out to be very trustworthy.
He’d even accepted an invitation to come to my home for dinner and meet a few clan members. Several of the cheekier clan members had tried to scare the general off, but he’d only laughed. He’d told them I was the only shifter he feared.
As two powerful leaders, we’d built a trust over the years. We had tested our trust many times, but it had yet to break under the strain of secrecy.
My small team, Cutter and Grant, had been on over one hundred special missions, bringing in dangerous enemies, threats to the government and the country. In the beginning, we’d dealt solely with human targets because Taggert hadn’t known about the bigger threat—feral and rogue shifters who refused to abide by the shifter code of conduct.
Then one day General Taggert had called me and started asking questions about the existing number of bear-shifter clans and wolf-shifter packs. His questions made me uncomfortable. It was one thing to reveal the existence of my clan but quite another to out other shifters.
I was a member of the Shifter Council—a secretive group of alpha leaders from various shifter breeds—and sworn to secrecy.
So I’d compromised, giving him a number of rogue wolf-shifter packs that had become a nuisance to other shifters because of their reckless behavior of killing shifters and humans. But that was all the information I’d been willing to provide him.
That was a few years ago, and soon after that first meeting, Josh Price had shown up on General Taggert’s radar.
I’d already known about Price. Most shifters did. He was an alpha of a rogue wolf-shifter pack. Price showed little respect to other shifters and had flat out refused to abide by shifter law mandated by the council. The world was dangerous for shifters. Humans could discover our existence if we didn’t follow the laws that governed our conduct.
But Price felt he was above shifter law. Rumors had said Price was ruthless and ruled his pack by intimidation. When he’d become the alpha of his pack, he’d murdered quite a few males who he’d thought could challenge him for the alpha position.
When he’d shown up on General Taggert’s radar, Josh had been busy making a name for himself in many circles and not in a good way. The local police had been cleaning up bodies, and they still did not know where they’d come from. The corpses were mutilated, and all the reports had pointed to the same cause of death—wild animal attacks.
But I’d known what was really going on, and my team and I were under orders to bring in Price and as many of his group, alive, as we could.
Seven against three wasn’t bad odds, and I was always up for a challenge.
I ran through the trees, my big black nose sniffing the wind. Elk were definitely nearby, and my bear growled in anticipation of the kill. I had cooped up my inner beast for the past week while tracking Price. It was easier to hide as a man than as a giant grizzly bear, especially when Grant was a polar bear. That wouldn’t be easy to explain away at all.
I caught up to Cutter and Grant, standing taller than both of them, as they waited for orders. I shook out my head and motioned for them to get a move on toward the elk.
We had just turned to head down to the valley floor when another scent hit my nose, and I stood on my hind legs, snarling.
Wolves, I grumbled through the mental link all shifters shared with their clans or packs.
Grant and Cutter stopped beside me.
It’s Price and his pack. They’ve shifted, I explained.
Do we move in?Cutter asked. His bear growled and snapped his teeth, biting at the wind. As usual, he wanted a fight.
We don’t have a choice.I fell back down to all fours and hurried through the woods.
Taggert had charged us with finding Price, but there was another reason we’d tracked them this far north.
This was my territory.
Price in human form was fine on the land, but the second he’d shifted, he’d broken shifter law. I was now forced to act before Price could spill the blood of an innocent in my territory. Hunting animals was one thing—still disrespectful, but not against shifter law. If Josh spilled a human’s blood, like the human woman’s, I wouldn’t be taking him in alive. I’d have to kill him and the pack members he’d dragged with him.
