Tracking the Bear (Blue Ridge Bears Book 1)(27)

“Something like that.” It was hard to think around the distracting things his hands were doing to my breasts, but I forced myself to. There was something off about the night sky, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was.

“I need you to stay in the tent tonight,” he whispered. “At least until I’ve put up some defensive countermeasures, alright?”

“Alright.”

He climbed off of me with palpable reluctance and began digging in the pack that I’d never seen him touch before. He pulled out what at first looked like another, larger tent. But when I peered inside, there was no fabric, only tent poles, hammers and a book.

“What’s this?”

“Our countermeasure,” he replied, pulling the large bundles of poles out of the bag. They gleamed in the moonlight. Moonlight. That’s what I’d hadn’t been able to place. It seemed impossible that I’d missed it. I’d been tracking the ever-waxing moon as it made its progression toward full. Every day was a day closer to Luke’s transformation into a wild, unstoppable bear.

I studied the poles. They looked flimsy, and certainly not enough to keep out a bear. “What is it supposed to do?”

Chance pulled on a pair of gloves and began to fit the segmented poles together. After weeks of practice assembling the tent at night and collapsing it in the morning, I knew how this worked. I grabbed the second bundle and began assembling it as well.

“These poles are made of enchanted steel,” he explained. “It’s one of the few substances that can hurt or kill us if we’re exposed to it.”

“So silver doesn’t hurt you?”

“No, not really.”

He grabbed a stake from inside the bag and fixed the pole to the ground on the other side of our existing tent, hammering it into place with a mallet. He repeated the process on the other side, bending the pole so it formed a gleaming metal arch above our heads. I slotted the last piece into place on mine and handed it to him as well.

“No offense, but I don’t think this is going to stand up to a grizzly bear.”

“Most of the bears in the region where he was infected are actually black bears, not grizzly.”

“Alright, I don’t think this will stand up to a bear, period,” I said, glancing nervously up at the moon. “There’s all the empty space between these poles.”

“That’s where the runes come in,” he muttered. He traced his finger over one of the segments and a sigil of some kind glowed red-orange for a moment. As I watched, the light dimmed and the pole returned to normal.

“What will they do?” I asked.

“Spirits and spiritual beings cannot enter into a place of faith.”

“I don’t follow.” I traced my thumb over another of the segments, and nothing happened.

“I’m a spiritual being. You’re not.”

“Pardon me,” I scoffed. “I go to church every Sunday with my Aunt Carol. Or at least I did before this little road trip started.”

He laughed and stopped to hammer the first side of my pole into place. “That’s not what I meant. I mean my bear is a spirit and while I take a bear form, I can’t enter a place of faith. It’s like a physical barrier. That’s what I’m counting on to keep your brother out.”

“So…if we pray hard enough, this thing will repel bears?” It sounded even more ridiculous when I said it out loud.

He let out a rumbling basso laugh, and the warm sound brushed across my skin like the touch of velvet. I wanted to wrap myself in the happy sound and never let it go.

“Those are written in the language of my faith, so if I pray, yes, it should keep Luke and any other were-creature. The catch is that once it’s activated, it also keeps me inside during the full moon.”

I glanced nervously at our tiny tent. I didn’t think it could survive his violent transformation into a six-hundred-pound grizzly bear if what had happened last time was any indication.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, taking my face between my hands. He peered earnestly down at me, and his eyes looked almost black in the darkness. It was probably a trick of the shadows, but they looked closer to the eyes of his bear form than before.

“How long do you have?” I asked. Sex was definitely out of the equation until the lunar cycle was over. I sighed. I had been looking forward to doing that tonight.

“A half hour, if I’m lucky. I can feel it coming on.” As I watched, the skin of his arms rippled. His muscles bunched and he dropped his hands from my face quickly. “I need to get the last pole before I shift.”

“I’ve got it,” I said, and took a step back, out of the protective barrier of the poles. I searched the ground for the mallet and the remaining stake. I’d just rounded the final edge of the tent when I heard his shirt tear. Much less than a half hour, it appeared. I knelt on the ground, positioning the stake. It slipped from my hand when I heard Chance’s bear form let out an enormous bellow.

Hands, two pairs of them, wrenched me backward by my jacket and hair. I screamed as a fistful of my hair came out by the roots.

“Shut her up!” A gravelly male voice hissed from behind me. “The bear has already scented us. We have to do it quickly!”

I swung the mallet wildly and got lucky. It crunched on impact, and I would have bet good money that I’d broken someone’s nose. The hands that had been restraining me fell away, and I pushed myself into an upright position. I stumbled away from my attackers, catching sight of two hairy, misshapen men. The one whose nose I’d broken was still upright, but his partner continued to contort, accompanied by the disconcerting sound of grinding bone. It finally landed on all fours, and it had a distinctly lupine shape in the light of the full moon.