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Chapter Thirty-Two
Angel Fire was a ghost town when the bear clan arrived. Luther was first to breach the town limits, slowing his full-tilt run to a loping sort of jog as he scanned the area for danger. On the outskirts, all seemed well. His slowed pace gave Espie a chance to catch up to him, her grizzly form rather striking in the late afternoon sunshine. While ordinarily he could lose himself in her appearance alone, all he could think about was Violet and her safety.
“Don’t you have a cub?”
The question sounded over and over again in that slimy cougar’s voice, bouncing around his head and refusing to quit, not even when he left the forest behind. Yes, he had a daughter. And, yes, he would eviscerate anyone who dared lay a hand on her. She should be at home, but his every instinct told him he was about to find her somewhere else.
Espie snorted noisily beside him, her eyes bright and alert as she lifted her nose and breathed deep. He caught a whiff of her concern in the air; she feared for Violet’s safety, too. After exchanging quick glances, they carried on into town.
Behind them, the others caught up quickly enough, and while Luther needed to find his daughter immediately, he let Miguel take the lead charge to the downtown area. After all, he was the alpha. He ought to be the first face those cougar assholes would see.
Because if Luther was going up against him—for real, not just over a misunderstanding—he’d be worried. Miguel was an enormous creature, one of the biggest grizzlies he’d ever seen.
As the bears moved at a steady clip down a vacant Main Street, Luther suddenly caught Violet’s scent in the air. Nearby. She should have been far up the mountain, safe from this impending battle. She shouldn’t be…
As they rounded a corner and faced one of Angel Fire’s small downtown green spaces, they finally figured out where all the people had gone. There, surrounded by buff, muscular cougars, was a crowd of hostages. Most were humans, but he could scent some shifters in there. Paul, his eagle-shifter friend, Genica, and her little girl, Leah, huddled up close to him. And Violet, standing beside them in her polar bear form, using her body to shield the cougars from the people she loved.
Luther nearly lost it right then and there. He rose up on his back legs and roared. His mate pounded the pavement with her front paws, huffing and snarling. Willard Vesper had Violet hitched up on his hip as he stood on top of a bench, a loud-speaker microphone in hand.
“We have tried our peaceful protests,” he announced as the bears continued to move in on the circle of cougars. There were more here than there had been at the lair. Luther wanted to rip through each and every one of them—and save Vesper for last. “We have tried to make our demands known through slightly more…inventive means. And still you ignore us. You ignore Mother Earth. Today, we take our last stand. Until our demands are met, we will hold your people hostage. Bring me a negotiator.”
Luther glanced over his shoulder quickly. Who the hell was this jackass talking to? There was no one around but the bear clan and the cougars—and the hostages. Humans must have fled as soon as the conflict started. Not a police cruiser in sight. Typical.
Not that it mattered. This was shifter business, no matter how passionately Vesper tried to make it about the environment.
Miguel signaled telepathically for the bears to continue. Vesper scowled as the clan advanced on the little park, and his cougars’ tails started to flick, lips curling and fur rising.
“Stay back,” Vesper warned. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
He gave Violet a little shake as if to emphasize his point. All around Luther, bears bristled at the thinly veiled threat to Luther’s daughter. So, Miguel had been right. His daughter had a family bigger than she’d ever known. His chest swelled with pride, his footsteps falling in line with Espie and the bear beside him. No one was going to harm a hair on Violet’s head.
The clan would see to that.
“If our demands are not met, it is doubtful any of these hostages will live through the night,” Vesper insisted. “We are pushing for the immediate withdrawal of the mining corporation and all its employees. We demand the total destruction of the Ruiz Family Resort. You will meet these demands if you know what’s good for you!”
As he rambled on and on, reiterating his demands again and again, no one stopped to listen to him. No matter how serious the threats became, the bear clan did not consider any of them. Instead they charged forth as one, following their alpha into battle against the cougars.
Luther barreled into two cats at once, pinning them to the ground. Beside him, Espie charged over one of the cougar’s heads, straight for the crowd of hostages. They shrieked, most of them human and not understanding, but they had the good sense to flee when she thundered through them.
Off they went in all directions. Any cougars who tried to chase them down were first on the bears’ shit list. Those who didn’t immediately engage with a cat hung back, just as Espie and Luther had done at the lair in the forest, and they attacked those who took swipes at fleeing humans.
Paul, Luther’s eagle friend, shifted into his bird form, though clearly he wouldn’t be able to do much to help the fight on his own. When a cougar lunged for the bird, Luther slashed at the cat’s back legs, effective stopping it. The feline shrieked as blood spurted onto the ground, then whirled around and pounced. The two went tumbling to the ground in an all-out brawl, fur and teeth and claws everywhere.
The bears and the cougars seemed to be evenly matched. Bears had the brute strength, but cougars had the numbers. It quickly became apparent to Luther that this wouldn’t be as easy as the takedown of the lair had been.
That was…until the cavalry suddenly arrived.
As Vesper screeched out orders for his cougars, telling them to pile on Miguel and Espie, a bighorn sheep hopped up on his bench from behind a bush and headbutted him off. Luther’s head snapped in Vesper’s direction, frantically searching for Espie as more rams poured in, led by a black bear who attacked a cougar so savagely that it must have been dead on impact.
Ivo.
Luther wasn’t sure how he knew. He hadn’t met the man in bear form, yet somehow Luther just knew. It must be a perk of being part of a clan.
Shortly after the bighorn sheep arrived, hammering cougars left, right, and center, a pack of yipping coyotes joined the fray, along with a handful of somewhat useless armadillos. Apparently Espie’s friends had decided to bring in some reinforcements as well.
To those who didn’t know this was a shifter battle, it must have looked like the world was ending—animals fighting animals with an almost “human” intelligence. Good thing most of the humans had already fled.
After knocking unconscious the most recent cougar to go up against him, Luther stood up on his hind legs to scan the area for Violet—only to find her in Vesper’s arms again.
