“You think it’s the cougars?” It sounded stupid now he had said it. Shifters didn’t use guns. It just wasn’t the done thing. But he was worried about Saint.
“Nah.” Knox slowly turned to face the way they had come, looking back towards the Ridge. “Cougars are crazy, but they’re not that crazy. Quit worrying about Saint. As long as this storm is raging, he’s safe.”
His brother was probably right. The cougars were unlikely to go out searching for the female while the weather was like this. They would wait for it to pass and then they would track her down, and then Saint would be in trouble. Only crazy people would be out in this weather.
“Who do you think it was then?” Lowe scanned the mountain to his left, his gut saying the sound had come from that direction.
Knox bluntly said, “Hunters.”
Another shot rang out and confirmed Lowe’s feeling that it had come from their left. He tried to narrow it down more, but all he could do was guess. Either way, it was too close for comfort. He closed ranks with his brother, coming to stand slightly in front of him to shield him. Knox huffed at that.
“Humans are crazy, do stupid stuff like thinking they can handle a storm like this without it killing them, but in all the years we’ve lived here, no human has ever dared to come up this way to hunt in the dead of winter. There’s nothing awake here at this time of year.” Lowe glanced over his shoulder at Knox. “You don’t think it’s… Archangel?”
He had never personally encountered the hunter organisation that specialised in dealing with what they called ‘non-humans’ but he had heard the horror stories from numerous immortals in his years, and he had heard first-hand accounts of them from Saint, Rune and Maverick.
Archangel had held Rune and Maverick for decades in an underground arena where they had been forced to fight other immortals in cage matches. Slaves to the humans, made to kill each other for entertainment. Lowe didn’t even want to imagine what their lives had been like. Thankfully, Saint had participated in a raid on one compound in Vancouver and had freed them, and they had joined the pride.
Lowe wouldn’t exactly say Rune and Maverick were recovering from their ordeal. Sometimes, both bears had a cold, dead look in their eyes that warned everyone away from them. Sometimes, Rune and Maverick ended up brawling over the slightest thing, and Saint had to step in to stop them once it started to go too far.
The rest of the time, the two bears were thick as thieves, as close as brothers could be without the blood to link them. Hell, maybe even closer than siblings could be. They shared a strong bond, one forged in that crucible, in whatever hell they had gone through and emerged from together.
Their bond was as powerful as the one Lowe shared with his twin.
A bond that was relaying how on edge Knox was right now.
Knox came to stand beside him and glared in the direction of the mountain. “I doubt it. Archangel haven’t dared come up this way since the cougars ran them off. It’s probably just a bunch of kids from town with too much testosterone, borrowing daddy’s hunting rifle and trying to impress some females.”
It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. Saint had scared away a fair number of groups of youths in his time. Normally they came up in summer though.
“What are they meant to be hunting in all this snow?” Lowe looked across at his brother.
Knox shrugged.
“Don’t know. Don’t care.” He pointed to tracks in the snow a short distance from them. “Moose maybe?”
Lowe was worried they were after more than the local ungulates. “What if they’re after the bears?”
One year, soon after he and Knox had settled at the Ridge, a group of adult males had come up to shoot bears in early spring while they had been asleep in their dens. He shifted from foot to foot as he remembered that day, his bear side restless with a need to hunt down whoever was on the mountain and deal with them as he had those hunters. They hadn’t made it back to town.
Saint had buried their bodies deep in the forest on the other side of the valley with Rune and Maverick’s help, and none of them had spoken about it since.
Knox had been given the unenviable task of talking Lowe down, convincing him to shift back from his bear form, and had a few scars to show for it. Lowe hadn’t been able to stop himself from lashing out at anyone who had come near the dead female black bear and her tiny squirming cubs that had been crawling on her, calling for her.
In the end, it had been Rune who had managed to convince Lowe to shift back. A big cinnamon black bear himself, he had been as angry as Lowe to see what the hunters had done to an innocent mother.
Rune had shown a softer side that still seemed impossible, had bundled up the two cubs in his jacket and had taken them back to the Ridge, and had ended up raising them both in his cabin. The two females had grown up strong and healthy, and after a few years of being tutored by their adoptive cinnamon bear father, they had gone on their way.
Sometimes, they dropped by the Ridge in summer.
Lowe had been moved to tears the first time one had shown up with cubs in tow. Rune had demanded she tell him who the hell had knocked her up and had then proceeded to roll around on the stone bank of the creek with them, playing until both cubs had been exhausted.
Everyone at the Ridge knew where the sisters overwintered and Saint always went to check on the two of them when they woke. Lowe worried that one spring soon, Saint was going to come back with bad news. Wild bears didn’t have anywhere near the same lifespan as their shifter counterparts.
He looked to his brother, needing to hear him say that the hunters weren’t after the bears, and wind whipped against him.
Laced with the faintest hint of blood.
“You smell that?” Lowe frowned in the direction of the mountain.
Knox stared hard at it too, blue eyes scanning the blizzard and the shadowy shapes of the trees.
He muttered, “I smell it. Guess we have our answer now. The humans are hunting each other.”
Lowe pulled down a deeper breath as wind gusted against him. He caught the scent more clearly and every muscle in his body clamped down onto his bones as an urge to growl rolled through him, hitting him out of nowhere.
A third shot rang out.
Lowe kicked off, sprinting through the trees in the direction it had come from.
“Come back!” Knox yelled.
Lowe couldn’t.
He needed to find the source of that scent, before he was too late.
Before whoever was after her ended up killing her.
Chapter 3
Cameo was quick to release the bear spray and depress the trigger. Her aim was a little off, caught only the man with the rifle. He roared in agony and stumbled backwards, fumbling with his gun as he raised his hands to his face, and she flinched and tensed as the loud crack of it firing made her ears ring. She broke into a sprint as the second man moved, running to her left, placing the injured man between her and the one with the pistol.
He hollered something at her that she didn’t hear over her fast breaths, over her heart as it thundered in her aching ears. She just kept running, winding through the trees, trying to use them for cover as her mind raced. What was she going to do?
Adrenaline surged, had her blood pumping faster as she squinted into the snow that rushed towards her and battled the fierce wind. Her legs ached but she kept running, trying to see the path ahead of her, pushing herself past her limit as fear gripped her. She had to keep running. It didn’t matter where she ended up. She would deal with that once she had escaped.