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“I do not know, but I can smell Richard and Ru.”
“Why torture them if you’ve won?” I asked, starting to run toward the open door.
“I have never shared a victory with Lord Deimos, but some men save their cruelest actions not for the battlefield, but for after they have won.”
“Fuck that,” I said, and ran faster.
46
A man screamed, butit wasn’t Richard’s voice, so who was it? The fact that I didn’t know who Rodina was torturing and trying to get Demo Man to stop torturing made me stop running and try to get closer to the door without them seeing me. I pressed myself against the wall to the right of the doorway trying to see into the room, but that half with the platform and guardrail was empty. Before I went to the other wall where they’d likely see me, body memory kicked in and I went for my gun, which wasn’t there. Damn it.
I felt Goran coming up behind me; his energy was prickling along the back of my body, and then deep inside me where the beasts lived something stirred. It was black-furred, but I didn’t mistake it for my panther. The fur was rougher, thicker, a different texture even at a glance. That huge black body turned toward me, almost lost in the darkness where all the beasts stayed, and then it turned and looked at me and the thrill of surprise went through me from my head to my fingers and toes, because it was totally unexpected. The face was as white as it was black, with narrow white lines encircling the black around the eyes. For a split second I thoughtreverse panda, but the white line above the eyes had a wide white stripe down between the eyes, around the black nose, and then spilled down its throat and onto the chest, where it was hidden from me because the animal wasstill on all fours. The bear went up on its hind legs, towering above me. I gazed upward in front of me as if the bear really was standing there with the white spreading down the throat to touch the edge of the chest. I tried to think—spectacled bear, Andean bear—and I knew I was wrong. They were small bears compared to grizzly, or Kodiak, or even polar bears, and this one was bigger than all of them.
I heard Goran sniffing the air loud and snuffling. He was scenting my bear. He moved closer, his breath warm on my hair, then hot against the side of my face. It made me close my eyes and relax into his energy for a second, and then the bear inside me roared and forced me to whirl around to face Goran. I started to swipe at him with a huge, clawed paw, but I remembered in time that I didn’t have one of those in this form.
“Back up,” I said, and there was a rumble in my chest like I’d swallowed a roll of thunder. I stared up at him; his human form seemed almost as big as the bear in my head.
“I would never hurt you, Anita,” Goran said. He started taking off one of his gloves. “Please, skin-to-skin contact. It’s been so long, longer than you can imagine.”
“What the hell are you doing out here?” Demolition Man said in the doorway. He was rubbing one hand up and down his arm like there were goose bumps to get rid of. Apparently the energy of our bears had interrupted the torture. Great. I hadn’t even had to step into the room, damn efficient.
Rodina yelled, still in the room, “Use your nose, I can smell the bears from here.”
“This isn’t like any bears I’ve ever smelled,” Demo said.
“You are too young, your beast is too young to remember,” Goran said. He had his glove off now. He held his hand out toward me.
“Just touch her,” Demo said.
“Only if you want to die,” Goran said.
“Mischa said you were cave bear, this isn’t that,” I said.
“Do you know what we are?”
“Older, a short-faced bear, a giant short-faced bear,” I said.
“What the hell is a short-faced bear?” Demo asked.
“We are,” Goran said, but neither of us did more than glance at him. The energy was building between us, but it wasn’t like most of my other beasts. There was no danger of shapeshifting; my bear was standing upright to be as tall and intimidating as possible, but she wasn’t ready to attack either. She was waiting, trying to judge the bear in front of us. The man in front of us.
“Why does she, my bear, think of you as a bear first and man second?”
“Don’t all wereanimals think that way?” Goran asked.
Demo and I actually answered together: “No.”
I glared at him, and it was like I felt my bear turn her head and give him a measuring look. It was the kind of look I gave someone when I was deciding if I could take them in a fight, or if I would have to kill them now, instead of later. The only extra calculation that she made that I didn’t was—is it food?
I did not want to eat Demolition Man. Not as meat, like she was thinking, and definitely didn’t want him to be food for theardeur. Then I remembered that theardeurwas gone. Deimos had taken it and put despair and terror in its place like in the dream he’d given me. I did not want to feed on people’s tragedies. I was already a cop; I saw people on their worst days. I did not want that to be part of my magic. My bear looked at me and the longer I stared at her face the more beautiful it became. Her eyes weren’t brown of any shade, but a deep grayish blue. Bears didn’t have eyes like that, but she did. She looked at Goran and approved.
“Has she decided if I may touch you?” Goran asked.
“Yes, she says yes,” I said, and held my hand out to him. The moment his skin touched mine the energy was incredible. It chased over my skin in goose bumps, it blew my hair in a wild tangle around my face, it curled against the wall behind me and asked wordlessly what did we want to do with all of it.
I wanted to go home, but home wasn’t a building, it was people, the people I loved. Deimos had taken them from me in a way that I didn’t understand. The vampire marks intermingling me with Richard and Jean-Claude had terrified me once, made me run away from both of them. Now I had so many people running through my head and heart for so long that it was part of home now. I wanted that back.
Goran’s heart was in my head, because I could feel his loneliness; it wasn’t like just losing someone you loved. It was losing all your people, everything you’d ever known, your whole world lost until you were the last survivor. We have a word for it now:endling. Goran was the last of his kind on the planet. The Mother of All Darkness had destroyed his master by destroying all the bears that that ancient vampire could call to his aid. Then she had given Goran to Mischa, the only vampire she had in her employ that could call bear. She gave Goran away like he was a stray puppy that needed a new home. Mischa hadn’t wanted him. He’d wanted a priestess, a bear priestess, a mother of animals, walker of the void, one of the dreamers that re-creates the world each winter and brings it out alive and growing again in the spring. But the Mother of All Darkness destroyed any magic she thought might rival hers, so she killed all the holy women of Goran’s people to defeat a vampire that had created a territory here in America before that was even the dream of a name for this land. I drank down Goran’s sorrow, his eons of grief, his fear of Mommy Darkest. If Deimos had only known what a feast he had right beside him; but he hadn’t seen Goran’s magic, because Mischa didn’t see it.
