Bearly Hanging On (The Jamesburg Shifters #6)(26)

*

Jamie's swooping took her up, then down, up and then down again, along the drifts of wind, and almost to the ground. She skimmed along lakes, rivers, and the tops of Jamesburg's famous Douglas firs, and then finally saw what she thought Ryan had talked about during his fevered, vampire-bitten rambling before she left him in West and Elena's care.

In an attempt to figure out what was going on, Jamie asked him where he lived, thinking that would give her a clue, but the directions were so jumbled and odd that it took a few days of mulling it over before she was able to make enough sense of them to follow. But, when she finally did, what she saw was a mixture of completely unsurprising, and still unsettling.

How could something like this go completely unnoticed for so long?

A bunch of houses, most of them hand-built, and all of them made with a mixture of love and desperation.

"Jamesburg's forgotten," she said sadly. "So forgotten, that only a handful of people in town know they exist. Ryan's their saint, I guess, because without him, who knows how long ago they would have died."

Still, she couldn't fathom that the guy she was almost nightly fantasizing about was also a cow thief, and also knocked over a couple of grocery stores in the middle of the night. No one was hurt - as rough and tumble as he might act, he wasn't going to hurt anyone, but damn had he stolen a lot of cans of creamed corn.

Okay - alleged to have done all those things. Someone knocked over the town’s biggest grocery stores, stealing canned goods and apparently sacks of dog food and birdseed by the ton, and there was nothing to go on. Not a shred of evidence, not a hint of hide nor fur.

But Jamie thought it might be worth it to finally go and visit this bear who kept haunting her dreams.

She knew she had to do something before he went too far. But as she circled the deep forest compound, it became very obvious to Jamie that he wasn't making any of it up. There were a lot of forgotten people out here, and most of them were trying their best to cut wood or tan hides, or anything they could.

Jamie watched one very old man - she could tell by his crooked gait and slumped back - finish up a row of some sort of planting. He was chewing a stick that looked a bit like bamboo, but from her height she couldn't be sure. Even so, from all the way up there, and from all her speed, she knew Ryan was right. His methods might be wrong, but... then again, what else was he supposed to do?

Is that him? Jamie circled slowly around someone hacking away at a pile of logs about half the size of himself. Pick one up, lay it on a stump, whack it with a big wedge, rinse and repeat. He's even good looking when he chops wood.

It was him all right - Ryan was shirtless, covered in a thin sheen of sweat from his work. The hair on his forearms and his chest was thick, but not out of control. The slopes of his shoulders were defined by big trapezius muscles that flexed every time he raised the maul and exploded with each impact. She stopped the circling and bobbed up and down, about fifty feet off the ground, behind him.

"I know you're back there," he called out. "You make a shadow that's fairly unique."

Jamie felt herself blush - and she was not, in any way, a blusher. She settled to the ground, then tucked her wings back behind herself, and crossed her arms behind her back. Slowly, almost cautiously, like either a tentative lover, or someone who wasn't entirely sure how the person they'd just drugged was going to react.

Six of one, half a dozen raged-out bears of another, Jamie thought, still walking slowly toward Ryan.

"What are you doing?" he asked. "It isn't like I'm going to, I dunno, drop out of the sky and bite you on the neck."

There was a laugh after he spoke, though Jamie couldn't decide whether it was bitter or genuine. "Sorry about that," she said. "I just... I didn't want you to end up doing something you were going to regret."

His arms froze at the apex of the next swing. Muscles were all taut and primed to explode, but he just stood there, flexed, as flawless with his back turned as one of the eight hundred imitation David statues Jamie'd seen when she was in Florence, except with a pair of jeans that were hanging loosely on his hips. Well, and that he was tanned and not made out of plaster casting.

She came to a stop just outside the range of the maul's head, should he swing it. "You seem okay," she began. "Doesn't seem like—"

"Regret?" he swung, the tool thunking heavily into the wood, splitting it down the center in one strike. "What would you know about regret?"

All right, there's the venom.

"Ryan," she started, "I didn't know how bad it was. I’ve been after Erik to do something for a while, both Izzy and I have, but we had no idea it was this bad. How could we?”

"Care? Find out? It isn't like we're exactly hidden. Thirty little houses and two big ones, not even ten miles from your buddy's farm, or ranch, or whatever it is, and I'm supposed to believe the entire town has no idea we exist?"

Jamie shrugged, her wings unfurling in nervousness. She uncrossed her arms, and let them hang limp at her sides. "I don't know," she said. "That's all I can say is that I don't know how no one knew. There's a lot about these woods that no one knows. Hell," she took a breath, trying to come up with the right words. "I mean, it took six months before anyone knew Jenga had strung cable from the middle of town out to his place, and he's only five miles from town. This place may as well be the middle of the ocean."