I escaped down the alley, barely noticing the foul greasy odors of the dumpsters I trotted past. The security lights cast a dim yellowish glare on the uneven patches of concrete.
“Away, away, away,” I chanted under my breath. I was just so goddamned tired of running. Damn my bear anyway.
She chirruped hurt at me, and I was immediately sorry. I didn’t mean it, I thought at her. You saved me so many times.
I still felt the cold of her hurt. It was hard for her too. All she wanted was to find a mate, settle down near a nice patch of woods, and raise some cubs. Here I was dragging her from town to town.
I’m sorry! We’ll find a home, I promised her. Her hurt slowly eased.
I didn’t know how I’d keep my promise. When we left Canada I thought things would get better. But the U.S. was even tougher. So many rules, so many bits of paper you had to have to get a job. Without them you were stuck working with people willing to break laws. At the last big city I’d been smart enough to get multiple fake IDs, but at the rate I was burning through them I’d need more soon.
That was a problem for another day. For now, I just needed to get out of Parrish. Shifter or not, that Rutkell guy was bad news.
There was a bus station in town. I’d passed it when I first came into town. But not too many buses came through. Rutkell would know right away which way I’d gone.
Swinging several blocks away from the bus station, I kept going straight through to the forest, where I shifted. It made me feel like such a fool, like I was pretending to be James Bond, when I crossed over a stream, climbed up a tree, climbed back down, retraced my steps to the stream, and splashed upstream until I found a branch flowing toward town that I could follow. I did it anyway. All the while my back was itching, just knowing there was someone following me.
At the outskirts of town I shifted back to human form. Making sure not to cross where I’d passed before, I hurried to the station. There was one bus for Idaho scheduled to leave at 6 a.m. and another for Portland at 6:40. Either one meant I had to wait over four hours. I bought a ticket to Portland and hunkered down for the wait.
The clerk came out from behind the ticket counter to lazily push a broom. He stopped to shoot the breeze with the security guard.
“What’s the ruckus?” the clerk asked.
For the first time I noticed the sound of sirens in the distance.
“It’s coming from chow row,” the security guard replied. “Probably a brawl.”
Chow row was what everyone called the street with all the restaurants and bars. The restaurant where I’d worked was on chow row.
The siren probably had nothing to do with me, but I was sick with fear anyway. Mark was the kind of guy who’d lie and say I’d pushed him for no good reason. Of course the police would believe him over an itinerant like me.
I brazened it out. Running after I’d bought a ticket would really attract attention. And where would I go? The forest? If that Rutkell guy was after me, alone in the forest was the worst place to be. Sure, he could be a hedgehog shifter. Right, with that predator smell. I couldn’t chance him being a bear too.
The hours crawled by. A bus arrived. Passengers poured out to use the restroom and buy snacks from the vending machine. A couple of them joined me on the bench to wait for another bus. I felt less conspicuous.
A police car with flashing lights stopped right in front of the doors. I froze, and worked at keeping the terror off my face. I’d been taken to a holding facility once. Never again.
A cop got out and sauntered to the ticket window, where he exchanged a few words with the clerk. If the guy at the other end of the bench hadn’t been playing a shoot-’em-up without headphones, I might have caught the entire conversation, but all I heard was “bear attack” and “keep an eye out.”
They couldn’t be talking about me. I hadn’t seen a soul while I was in bear form. Rutkell? Or a real bear?
The waiting didn’t get any easier, but at last it was over. A bus rumbled over to the sign that said “Portland.” The driver, still yawning and her hair flattened on one side, wandered off the bus and said a few words to the ticket clerk. The ticket clerk got on the loudspeaker and announced our departure in ten minutes.
I made a final restroom run and climbed aboard, the bus trembling beneath my feet. The driver had already started the engine. She took my ticket and closed the door.
I found an empty seat halfway to the rear and slid in. Already the air was heavy with the smells of people closed into a long metal box. I opened my window a crack—I didn’t want to deal with complaints from other passengers about being cold or I would have opened it as far as possible—and stood up to breathe the slightly fresher air. A figure coming in the front station door caught my eye.
Rutkell.
My stomach started cramping. I turned my back and slowly sat, trying not to attract his attention with sudden movements. My face still averted, I leaned away from the window and bent to adjust my shoelaces as the bus slowly pulled out.
I didn’t dare look out the window, but I didn’t feel the intensity of someone watching me. That gave me hope that he couldn’t know which bus I was on.
And if he did catch up to me, my bear and I would handle it. We’d have to.
At Portland I changed to a bus to California, land of movie stars and theme parks. I wasn’t interested in either, but I felt a pull to go south. Wanderlust, maybe. At the rate I was moving now, I’d hit Mexico in another two years.
I dozed through Oregon, stirring when we reached Medford. The bus was still in town when my cell phone rang. That gave me pause. No one had my number but my bosses at work.
Warily I glanced at the number displayed on the screen. I didn’t recognize the area code.
If I’d had more sleep and been alert, or if I’d just been thinking, I would have known better than to answer.
But without any thought at all I pushed accept.
A male voice I’d never heard before spoke. “Sarah.”
Instantly awake, my bear whimpered at me. I hardly noticed. My attention was riveted on that deep voice. Although I’d never heard it before, I knew it.
My whole system was shocked into awareness as though I’d plunged into ten feet of cold water. My breath stuttered.
Then came the wave of arousal. A shiver of need slid down my spine. My nipples hardened, and my pussy watered for him. My toes curled from wanting him.
I took a long rasping breath, and found my voice. “Sorry, wrong number.”
Ending the call, I sank back in my seat, phone clutched in my hand and feeling like I’d just run twenty miles.
My bear shrieked at me, cries of mate, want, mate, cubs. Mate.
It didn’t matter. He knew my real name, and he had to have known at least one of my aliases to get my phone number. All these years later, and they’d finally tracked me down.
Not my family. They had to have been relieved the ungodly one was gone. Better to be dead and in heaven—or wherever sinners like me went—than alive and sinful.
No, he was searching for the killer of that man back in Canada.
The first time I shifted, it was because my bear came out to protect me. I had to protect her too.
I’d been taken into custody one time not long after the first shifting. I was still young, and the police pegged me for what I was, a runaway. I’d hated the bars trapping us. My bear hated it worse. Neither of us knew what was going on, and she was scared and frantic.
It had taken all my strength to keep her in. I must have looked like a drug addict, huddled shaking in a corner of the cell.
When a single guard came to take me to a hearing or something—I wasn’t clear on what was happening—I let her lead me out of the cell and down a series of hallways and into a room where a judge sat in a raised enclosed platform. The guard turned to talk to a man sitting at a computer near the door we’d come in.
I leaped over a table and railing, down an aisle, and slammed through the doors. I’d run down a hallway to stairs, thrown myself past astonished faces to the ground floor, and shoved the wrong way through metal detectors. Ignoring shouts to stop, I barreled out the glass doors to freedom.
Behind me something exploded and tore through my shoulder. I kept running, dodging people and heading for the direction of the cedars I smelled. I left a trail of blood on the sidewalk and grass, and over the fallen needles.
I swarmed up the first tree I reached, shifting as I went. Running along a branch, I leaped into the next tree, and to another tree again, until I couldn’t go any farther. Then I climbed as high as I could and waited for them to stop searching.
After that, I’d been more careful. No more locked rooms, uh-uh.
No matter how seductive that voice on the phone sounded, no matter how much my bear and I wanted him, we couldn’t risk him catching us.
I turned off the ringer, and I checked my phone for photos or texts or anything personal. It kind of hurt to delete my diary, but I gritted my teeth and did it. Then, after wiping the phone clean on front and back, I shoved it beneath the seat cushion.
For two more hours I sat on that bus, certain that at any moment it would stop and someone would come aboard to get me. I kept the window wide open, ignoring the loud complaints of the man in the seat behind me.
We crossed the state line into California. I managed to keep my seat for the first stop. I had a superstitious fear my scent would drift over the border and lead him to me. My fear receded as we left the border behind. The next time the bus stopped, I got out.
If he had discovered I had taken the bus to Los Angeles, leaving it long before arriving there would put him off my trail. I hoped.
Yet as I trotted away from the station, it wasn’t relief I felt, but desolation.