Bad Blood Bear (Bad Blood Shifters Book 1) Page 3

  I’ll hurt her. Or she’ll hurt me. Just leave her be.

  She doesn’t need me.

  The words tore at his insides.

  That was the worst part about his life now. There wasn’t anybody left who needed him, who leaned on him, who he could provide for and take care of. Most male grizzlies were hard workers and hard partiers—they mated late or not at all. Tank was different. His bear was a natural Protector, even though he’d never filled that role in his home clan. He and Angie had been a clan of two. They’d bonded young, and he’d not only adored her, he’d loved being mated.

  He’d loved having someone to come home to, someone to look after and make happy. He’d lived for Angie’s smiles, her bubbling laughter, her delight in the smallest gift or thoughtful gesture. Losing her had ripped out his heart and left his soul slowly bleeding to death.

  All the torment he suffered after that was only what he deserved, for not keeping her safe.

  He’d tried to squash that part of himself, the part that fucking cared so much. It had betrayed him too many times. Angie was dead and he was broken, and why the fuck couldn’t he learn his lesson? He’d let one more helpless-looking female draw him in and then attack. Of course she didn’t need him. Trying to help strangers only led to pain.

  When would he ever learn?

  Tank turned his truck off the main road and bumped down the dirt track that led to the compound he shared with the other shifters who’d escaped Alexander Grant’s chamber of horrors.

  He still wasn’t used to being part of a crew—if that’s even what you could call this accidental collection of fucked-up misfits. They hadn’t come together through choice, or through a shared profession like the crews who did security, or worked as lumberjacks or on oil rigs. The only thing they had in common was that they’d all been captured by Alexander Fucking Grant’s shifter hunters and kept in his underground bunker to be tortured and experimented on by the Professor, his demented pet scientist.

  When they broke out, most of them had scattered. Some had people they could go back to; some just wanted to get as far away from Grant’s hellhole as possible. Some were too far gone into the land of crazy to survive; they’d killed each other, or been caught and put down by the Shifter Council’s Enforcers.

  Or by Tank and his friend Flynn.

  It was a mercy, Tank knew—and a necessary part of life as a shifter. Any shifter that posed a danger to the community or to humans was a danger to them all. If they weren’t sane enough to hide their nature, then they risked shifters being outed to the general public.

  Something that could not be allowed to happen.

  It was bad enough when a few of the wrong people knew they existed. It led to exactly what had happened to all of them—being hunted by humans, as trophies or science experiments.

  If they were ever outed for real…

  Tank’s bear started to growl, started to fight his way out of Tank’s skin. Thinking too much about what he’d been through and what he’d lost always set his bear off. It was like his animal had taken on all the pain of what happened to them, so that all the hideous, monstrous memories turned his bear into a monster too.

  It hadn’t been this bad in a long time. His bear was angry—angry at being attacked by Lissa, angry Tank had made him leave her. He was snapping and snarling and busting to get out and bleed someone.

  Their compound was a cleared area in the forest, centered around Alexander Grant’s former hunting cabin, only ten miles away from the bunker where he’d held them all prisoner.

  Some days Tank thought about how fucked up it was, staying here so close to the place that held so many nightmares for all of them.

  And yet, why the hell not? Living in one of Grant’s former homes and enjoying his possessions while he rotted in jail on charges of attempted murder, kidnapping and human trafficking was a particularly satisfying form of justice—almost as satisfying as killing the fucker would have been.

  The fact that they actually owned it now was even better.

  But a cabin and a territory sure as hell didn’t make a crew. He didn’t know if this group could ever pull together the way a crew should.

  Tank pulled the truck into the compound and parked it, fighting the urge to Change. He wished like hell he could just be normal again—go to work, come home, eat dinner, down a few beers. Make love to his mate.

  Change into bear form once or twice a week, amble through the woods with his mate by his side, exploring and just enjoying his animal nature with someone he loved.

  Not this simmering anger that sprouted teeth and claws, and wanted to bleed something.

  Only the taste of blood seemed to satisfy him. It was like having a demon inside, one that could burst out without warning and turn him into something he hated.

  He sat in the truck for a minute, leaning his arms on the steering wheel, trying to get ahold of himself. Then he climbed out with a sigh and got ready to unload the lumber out of the back of the truck.

  The first person he saw was Jasmin, stalking out the front door of the main cabin. Like most cat shifters, she moved like silk sliding through your fingers. Her long, straight black hair rippled in the breeze.

  “Hey, Teddy,” she called out in her raspy voice. The others called him Teddy sometimes because of his bear—their idea of a stupid joke. “Did you pick up the grocery order?”

  Shit. He’d forgotten all about it. “Ah, fuck,” he said. “Something came up and drove it right out of my mind. Help me unload this lumber and you can take the truck back.”

  She paused on the porch steps and gave an annoyed hiss.

  “Oooh, Jungle Kitty’s mad,” came a voice from right above him. It was Xander, the homicidal panther shifter, stretched out on one of the thick limbs of a huge oak tree that overhung the parking area, trimming his nails with a Bowie knife.

  Tank was in no mood. “Shut up, asshole,” he snapped.

  “Ooh, Teddy’s mad too,” Xander said. “Don’t get your stuffing all balled up, Pooh Bear. Or is that Poo Bear, as in ‘pile of shit’?”

  Tank looked up and growled at him, his hands clenched into fists. Xander’s eyes went feral green and he sent the Bowie knife spinning down at Tank. Tank grabbed it out of the air by the handle, flipped it and threw it back so it thunked into the tree trunk, inches from Xander’s head.

  With a ripping snarl, Xander busted out of his clothes into panther form and launched himself at Tank.

  His bear burst out before he even had time to get his clothes off, and they shredded and dropped to the ground. There went another perfectly good pair of broken-in jeans. Fucking panther.

  Tank gave a tree-shattering roar and rose to his hind legs, shrugging the panther right off his back. Xander twisted and hit the ground on all four paws, then launched himself at Tank again. Tank batted him out of the air, drawing blood with his razor-sharp claws.

  Xander yowled, but whether it was in pain or in anger, it was hard to tell. Any cat stupid enough to repeatedly take on a grizzly had to be impervious to pain.

  Tank felt needle-sharp claws on his flank. Fuck it all, Jasmin had joined in. Her dappled jaguar spots shimmered in the sunlight. He tried to hold himself back, but his bear was pissed off and wanted blood. He slapped at Jasmin, his claws raking down her side, and charged Xander, mouth open in another roar.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, that’s enough!”

  The words bellowed through the clearing, shaking the trees almost as much as Tank’s roar. It was Flynn, their sort-of alpha. Normally, his anger coupled with his alpha presence would have frozen them all in their tracks, but too much shit had happened today, and Tank’s bear was out of control.

  With another mighty roar, he turned on Flynn, and then he was thundering across the clearing to where the alpha stood on the porch of the cabin. With another curse, Flynn shucked his jeans, and then a giant black-maned lion was hurtling through the air on a collision course with Tank.

  Chapter 5

  They met like
two freight trains rushing head-on, and the shock jarred Tank all the way up his spine. He bellowed in pain and outrage as the lion’s weight bore him to the ground, claws raking across his shoulder. He rolled over and snapped at Flynn’s hind leg, but missed. The other two cats were frozen, crouched low, eyes wide and tails lashing.

  Flynn stood over Tank and gave a thunderous roar, hurting his eardrums. The enormity of his alpha presence pressed down on Tank’s body and mind. Tank’s bear rolled to his side, panting, pinned to the ground by the sheer weight of it. Gradually, his anger dissipated, the red haze fading until his head bowed in submission.

  Flynn stood over him a moment longer, then stalked back toward the house, his tail twitching. He gave Tank one more claws-out swat as he passed, drawing a bit more blood just to make his point. He changed back just as he reached the porch and swiped his jeans up off the floor, still obviously pissed off.

  “You two!”

  He turned and pointed at the panther and the jaguar. “Change back and unload the lumber. And Xander, put the chestnut paneling you stole from Tank’s project back down at the construction site. I would have bought you your own, but now I’m not gonna, because you’re such an asshole.”

  He stomped back into the house, shaking his head. Even his black dreadlocks looked annoyed.

  Xander Changed back and gave the finger to Flynn’s retreating back. “Didn’t want it anyway,” he muttered.

  Tank snatched up the remains of his clothes off the ground. He started for the cabin, but changed direction before he got to the front door and went around the back. Flynn was pissed off enough, and Tank didn’t want to get into it with him.

  He and Flynn shared the main cabin. The rest of them lived in makeshift outbuildings and trailers dotted around the property. Their territory was a hundred and sixty acres of forest bordering on parkland, purchased from Grant’s lawyers and gifted to them by the Nashville wolf pack as restitution for an unprovoked attack. The paperwork had just been finalized, and now they were mired down in permits and all kinds of other official bullshit. One of their main projects before winter hit was to get everybody into adequate housing.

  Then they had to find a way to make this bullshit conglomeration of bloodthirsty misfits into some kind of functioning crew—preferably one where the members had jobs. Otherwise the money was going to run out pretty fast.

  Tank went in the back door, throwing his mangled clothes into the trash bin on the way, only pausing to fish his wallet and his phone out of the pockets of his jeans. Note to self: beef up wardrobe. Being an out-of-control shifter was hard on the fashions.

  He went straight to the bathroom and started the shower running. It was a luxury shower with glass doors and fifty million shower heads, and there was a separate soaking tub. Since the cabin had formerly belonged to a psychotic billionaire with excellent taste and a weakness for luxury, it was one of the few showers that Tank actually fit into comfortably.

  He leaned his head against the tiled wall, watching the blood and mud swirl down the drain. The hot water stung the slashes across his back and thigh, but most of them were already closing, thanks to his accelerated shifter healing.

  Shit. Was this what his life had turned into? Brawling with a bunch of idiot misfits and living from day to day? He’d had everything once—a loving mate, a decent job building custom homes for a developer, a snug, laughter-filled home, and plenty of room to roam when he needed to Change.

  A sudden wave of homesickness washed over him, nearly buckling his knees. A vivid picture of the cabin he’d lived in with Angie, filled with special possessions they’d found at antique stores and craft fairs. He could feel the cool granite of the kitchen counter under his hands, smell the scent of the wood fire and Angie’s special pot roast cooking, feel her arms sliding around his waist as she snuggled up behind him and kissed his shoulder blade.

  He’d had all that, and it had all been destroyed because he hadn’t been able to protect the woman he loved. And yet his bear still hungered for connection, so much that it still drove him to want to protect broken souls and damsels in distress.

  Even if it killed him. And it nearly had.

  With a great effort, he pulled himself together and turned off the shower. One of the slashes on his back was still oozing blood—he could feel it. He wrapped a folded towel around his upper chest and tucked the ends in to absorb the blood.

  Note to self: buy black towels so the bloodstains won’t show. Lots of black towels.

  He wrapped another towel around his waist and went back to his bedroom. He didn’t know why he bothered, really—Flynn was always walking around with his dick hanging out, and the rest of them brawled so often that somebody was always naked from ripping out of their clothes in an uncontrolled Change. But he felt less vulnerable with the junk covered.

  On the way to his room he passed the spare bedroom. Tristan’s room—his best friend. He and Tris and Flynn had stuck together after they got out of Alexander Grant’s cells. They’d taken over this cabin after Grant was arrested, figuring nobody would be using it for a while.

  But Tristan was in Idaho now, trying to heal his broken mind. He’d been in captivity far longer than the rest of them, and his psychological scars ran deeper. He’d recently found his sister and was living with her and the Silverlake wolf pack, probably as happy as any of them would ever get.

  Tank missed him like hell. Hanging out with Tristan, and watching his back when his wolf went crazy, had taken Tank’s mind off his own problems and made his bear feel a little better. Now, once more, he had no one.

  Tristan had left some stuff in his room—what little he had. None of them had much. They’d all been ripped away from their homes, their old lives, starting over from scratch, and Tris had been on the run longer than any of them. For a while Tank had hoped the left-behind belongings meant Tris was coming back, but now he wasn’t so sure. Tristan had family in Idaho—his sister and her mate, and a little boy who was a distant cousin. Silverlake was a new pack, struggling to establish themselves, but it was a haven of sanity compared to this crew.

  Why would anyone stay here if they had somewhere else to go?

  He pulled clean underwear and jeans out of his dresser and put them on, then sat down on the edge of the bed with a sigh. He was just so damn tired of it all.

  He picked up his phone and balanced it in his hand. When he’d bought the new phone and signed in with his old account password, the phone had unexpectedly downloaded the backup data—all his old contacts and information. Friends, work, bank app. To his shock, he still had money in his accounts, and the auto-pay had kept the mortgage and utilities current on his old house. What condition it was in, with no maintenance and no one living there, was another question altogether. Probably by now, vandals or shifter hunters had broken in and destroyed everything.

  But it meant he did have somewhere else to go, if he could live with the ghosts of his old life.

  For the hundredth time, he thumbed through the contacts until he found his next-door neighbor’s phone number. Ben and his wife weren’t shifters, so Tank and Angie hadn’t been close to them, but they socialized now and then, lent each other tools, helped each other with big repair projects.

  He could ask Ben what state his house was in.

  If he wanted.

  He looked at the number a long time, thumb hovering over the ‘call’ button.

  There was a knock at the door, and he looked up to see Flynn filling the doorway. He’d put his pants back on, which was a small mercy. And he was carrying a bottle of Alexander Grant’s top-drawer single-malt whiskey, which was even better. They’d all be sad when that shit ran out.

  “Hey,” Flynn said. “How you doing?”

  “Healing,” Tank said. “My back will stop bleeding in a little while, probably.”

  Flynn gestured, and Tank shifted so Flynn could see his back. Flynn walked over and handed Tank the bottle, then pulled the towel away. He hissed between his teeth. “You need a coupl
e of butterfly bandages,” he said. “Got any?”

  “In the dresser.”

  Tank took a couple of good pulls of whiskey while Flynn went over and rummaged in the dresser drawer until he found the bandages, then came back and sat down on the bed behind Tank. He wiped the blood off, and Tank felt him pulling the edges of the wound together and anchoring them with the bandages.

  When he was done, Flynn laid his hand on Tank’s back for a second. “There,” he said. “Give it a couple of hours.”

  Tank nodded.

  Flynn turned until they were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed, their shoulders just barely touching. Shifters needed touch, to settle their animals and reassure each other. Tank knew Flynn wouldn’t apologize for cutting him up—it was his job as alpha of the crew to keep everyone from killing each other.

  But this touch was his way of saying ‘sorry.’

  Flynn picked up the damp bloody towel off the floor, looking at the splotches of blood staining the light gray fabric. “This stain ain’t coming out any time soon,” he said, holding it between his hands. “And we’ve been going through a shit-ton of towels, brawling so damn much.”

  None of them were completely in control of their animals—not after what they’d been through. Flynn was the closest to it, but even he had a short fuse, not to mention the occasional berserker death wish.

  Tank gave a huff and a half-grin, passing him the bottle. “I was thinking we should go with black after this,” he said. “Or maybe burgundy. Something that doesn’t show the blood.”

  “Fuck yeah,” Flynn said, taking a drink. “Make a note. Now that we have money, we can order about six dozen off the internet.”

  They sat there for a couple of minutes in silence, passing the bottle back and forth.

  Finally Flynn said, “Have you given any more thought to starting that business we talked about?”

  Tank took another pull of whiskey, thinking about how to answer. He and Flynn had discussed opening their own construction business, doing renovations on people’s houses and maybe small additions, decks, stuff like that. It would bring in income and help make the crew self-sufficient.