AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter Twenty-three
One blink and it was chaos. Men dropped to their knees all around her, pink and black and brown-skinned one moment, covered in fur the next. Alani did all she could to stay out of the way, but all she wanted to do really was surge forward and defend Ivo. His black bear form took the brunt of the initial ram assault, a trio of them surging forward to slam into him with those great round horns of theirs.
Clarissa yanked her back. “Come on,” she cried. “We can’t stay here!”
The woman tried to pull her deeper into the cave, but it was literal chaos around her. Worse than New York City when the subway train arrived, and people had thirty seconds to get on. She had been there once as a child. Her uncle had a barbershop in the city, and her mom scrimped and saved and scrounged every penny she had to bring Alani to the mainland to see her family. Going from her beautiful island to the concrete jungle of Manhattan had been almost too much to bear, and what Alani hated the most was all the people. They were everywhere. Surging in on her, invading her personal space, knocking her around.
That was what happened now. Frightened women and children tried to scramble out of the way as more bears rushed forward, but more than a handful of rams broke the line and charged into the cave.
In the madness, she and Clarissa ended up separated. Alani stumbled back into the wall, losing her footing but catching herself before she fell. At that moment, she felt so helpless. There were so many bears everywhere—most of them black bears like Ivo, but she couldn’t see him anymore. Miguel’s great grizzly was the only discernable bear in the lot of them. He was the biggest, the loudest, and could send three sheep flying with one swipe of his paw.
But it was Ivo she cared about. It was Ivo she wanted to check on. It was Ivo’s back she wanted to guard. At the sight of a smaller ram harassing a pair of elderly women, neither of them shifted and both cowering beneath a table, Alani finally took things into her own hands and rushed forward. She grabbed the ram by one of his horns, like she had seen sheep and goat farmers do back home, and just dragged him away.
Every inch was a struggle, but she eventually got enough space between the ram and the women for another bear to swoop in. A tawny bear with almost childlike brown eyes tackled the smaller ram to the ground, but the ram-shifter wriggled loose and charged back into the fray.
“Yeah, how’s that picking on someone your own size working out for you?” Alani called after it, and just for a second, she swore she saw the bear snort. Not that she knew what a bear looked like when it was snorting, but his expression seemed momentarily amused before he tore off after his target.
Who would have thought rams would be able to hold their own against a clan of bears? But somehow it was happening. Alani had just assumed bears, as apex predators, would wipe the floor clean with bighorn sheep, but the rams were large, rippling with muscle, and had the numbers advantage.
While it looked like many of the bear clan were being ushered into the depths of the cave, Alani couldn’t bring herself to go. She wasn’t about to throw herself into the thick of things either, but she could help the fringes any way she could.
She shrugged off the sweater Ivo had wrapped around her shoulders, finding the fabric thick and cumbersome now that she was moving again. A bead of sweat rolled down her forehead, and she brushed it away before it dripped into her eyes. Then, when it seemed unlikely that she could do any good just now, she crouched down and helped the two elderly women out from under the table.
“Go,” she urged, nodding away from the opening of the cave, away from the fight. “Don’t come back until the fighting stops.”
They both thanked her, hanging onto one another as though their very lives depended on the support, and then hurried away from the chaos. She watched them go, and then stumbled into the table when some of the fight broke off and a ram slammed into the back of her legs. Somewhere over the clamor was a roar, one she recognized as belonging to Ivo, and suddenly a black bear attacked the ram butting into her with such ferocity that she was sure she saw the shifter’s neck break on impact. Alani staggered out of the way, not wanting to distract him.
This was madness.
Pure, unadulterated madness.
All this devastation—just for some territory? Why couldn’t the rams be content with their lot? Why couldn’t the shifters have used their words? Alani pressed a trembling hand against the wall before she collapsed against it, sliding to the floor as the fighting intensified.
“Lucas!” It was then, just as Alani’s senses started to dull to the violence descending all around her, that she heard a cry so desperate that it shot right to her heart. It was a cry she could empathize with in a second; it was the cry of a mother terrified for her child.
Moments later, Clarissa’s toddler raced by Alani like a shot, remarkably steady on his feet for someone his size, and right into the fray. Maybe he was looking for his dad, because as Alani scrambled to her feet, heart hammering with panic, the toddler changed from a regular little boy into a grizzly bear cub.
Clarissa hobbled after him, her leg slowing her down, but she wore the determined glint in her eye that Alani knew well. Lucas disappeared into the scuffle in an instant, as toddlers are known to do, and Alani didn’t have to think twice; she raced in after him.
There was no way Clarissa could navigate the writhing sea of ram and bear bodies, clashing paws and teeth to horn and hooves. She threw herself in there without a second thought for herself, feeling the swipe of a ram’s horn in the process.
Alani dropped to her knees, calling Lucas’ name and hoping he understood over the noise. She spotted him at the edge of the cave, crawling for Miguel’s enormous grizzly form.
Miguel was in the process of battling five rams all by himself. Lucas would be crushed. Ivo barely seemed to notice Alani when he was blind with rage over someone hurting her; there was no way Miguel noticed what was going on around him with all those rams attacking him. If one of those bastards didn’t hurt the bear cub, his own father accidentally might.
Determined, Alani crawled through the mess of shifter bodies, some human, some animal, crying out and ducking whenever something swiped too close to her head.
“Lucas, no!” she admonished once she was close enough. When he didn’t stop, Alani threw herself across the cave’s entrance and all but tackled the cub to the ground. Lucas yowled, eyes wide with terror, and it made her heart swell with sorrow to see such a frightened look in those dark orbs. Dark like his father’s. Like Ivo’s too. But he wasn’t either of them. He was a child caught up in a bad situation, and Alani wasn’t going to let him get hurt.
“It’s okay,” she cooed as she held the wriggling cub to her chest. While he might have been small, he wasn’t the usual weight of a toddler, and his thick black claws were a lot sharper than she anticipated, slicing through her clothing as he flailed. “Lucas, it’s okay. I’m going to take you back to Mommy. Let’s go see Mommy.”
Or maybe she ought to bring him down the mountainside to safety? While Alani didn’t want to leave Ivo, this wasn’t the place for a child.
She managed to get to her feet with some difficulty, cooing and coddling the cub as best she could. His father roared nearby, sending three rams over the rocky plateau and down into the forest paths.
Lucas mimicked the roar weakly, flapping his arms in a way that made her think of human toddlers flailing about with happiness. The thought brought a smile to her face, but only for a moment. Because as the rams doubled their efforts to take down Miguel, a clear target in this attack, several also turned their attention to her.
Eyes wide, Alani tried to dart back into the cave and lose them in the skirmish, but two more burly rams blocked her way. Lucas settled instantly in her arms, perhaps sensing the danger, and Alani did her best to steady her breathing as to not inadvertently panic him further.
But when the rams reared back, preparing for a charge, there wasn’t much she could do to stop the whimper from flying past her lips. Wanting only to protect Lucas, she dropped to her knees and used her body to shield his, curling into a ball as best she could, face buried in his surprisingly soft fur, eyes clenched shut and teeth gritted for impact.
Only the horns never hit. Because just then, a streak of purple light flashed across the sky, so bright that it might have knocked her out had her eyes not been closed. A flash of lightning, yet in the air, Alani felt something. A sudden heaviness.
Somehow she just knew—it was the weight of magic.
