The Mane Squeeze

“Gwenie! Look, Gwenie! Look what I have!”

  Recognizing Blayne’s voice and knowing the wolfdog loved her and would save her from having her vital organs sold on the black market, Gwen glanced over.

  “Look at the sparkly, Gwenie! Don’t you wanna touch the sparkly?”

  Of course she did! Gwen released whatever she had in her hand and reached for the sparkly, shiny thing Blayne held. Gwen loved sparkly, shiny things. They were sooooo pretttttyyyyyyyyyyyyy…

  Blayne came back into the waiting room and, letting out a dramatic breath, sat down beside Lock again.

  “Whew! That was close. I had to steal someone’s car keys off their desk to distract her.”

  “What happened?” Lock had to know. He hadn’t been this entertained in years.

  Blayne shook her head. “I told them when we came in how they should treat her dosage, but they never listen.”

  Ronnie frowned. “Treat her dosage?”

  “We’re hybrids,” she needlessly reminded them. “What works for you as wolf doesn’t necessarily work for me as wolfdog. And it’s the same with Gwenie. Her metabolism is way higher than any lion’s or tiger’s. Most doctors try and base it on her weight as cat, which is about three hundred pounds unless she’s a little bloaty. Then it’s like three-hundred-and-twenty-five, but either way, basing it on her weight never works. I told them if they didn’t give her enough, she’d wake back up. ‘Don’t worry. We’re giving her something that will paralyze her muscles,’ they tell me.”

  “Probably pancuronium.” When they all stared at Lock, he asked, “What?”

  “Yeah,” Blayne said. “That stuff. Which I, personally, piss out. It doesn’t do anything for me.”

  “At all?”

  “Nope. And I warned them it wouldn’t work on Gwen unless they gave her enough. And what happens? She woke up and everyone is all shocked. ‘Why is she up?’ She’s up because you idiots didn’t listen to me in the first place.”

  “Is that why she’s afraid of hospitals?” Lock asked.

  “No. She’s afraid of hospitals because she saw this documentary on PBS once about organ theft. Ever since then, she’s been convinced they—the elusive ‘they,’ the terrifying ‘they’—want to steal her organs.

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m not that creative. Couldn’t make that up.”

  “But everything will be all right now?” the cat asked. “She has the right dosage now?”

  “Doubt it.”

  Clearly not the answer the cat wanted. He snarled, “What do you mean you doubt it?”

  The wolfdog leaned away from him, and Lock got tired of his attitude.

  “Don’t yell at her.”

  “I wasn’t yelling, and no one’s talking to you.”

  “Now ask me if I care you’re not talking to me?”

  “Why are you still here?” the cat demanded.

  The She-wolf reached for him. “Brendon—”

  “Stay out of this, Ronnie.” He glared at Lock. “Look, Baloo—” and if there was one thing Lock hated, it was those damn bear nicknames, even the ones from classic literature “—I think it’s time for you to go.”

  “I think I’d like to see you try and make me.”

  The lion actually stood, but the She-wolf grabbed the bottom of his hospital shirt, desperately trying to yank him back to his seat. At that moment, the doctor walked into the waiting room. The expression on her face was…odd. Although “confused,” might be a better word. But Lock knew that as a patient, he never wanted his doctor to look odd or confused.

  “What’s wrong?” The lion stepped toward her, forgetting Lock. “What happened?”

  “She’s…uh…disappeared.”

  “She…she what?” The cat stormed past the doctor and into the medical suite, Ronnie Lee and the coyote behind him. But Lock noticed how Blayne didn’t move. Nor did she look very concerned.

  Lock sighed. “Where is she?”

  Blayne shrugged. “Knowing my Gwenie? Halfway back to Philly.”

  “You sure? She wouldn’t be hiding in a closet? Or in the bathroom or something?”

  “Nope. Out the window is my guess. She’ll stay in the trees. She’s got those fierce tiger legs but, because of her weight, she can go like fifty feet, easy. Double what most tigers can do. Even if she is hopping.”

  “And you want me to go after her.” He wasn’t asking because he already knew that’s what she wanted before she sweetly smiled up at him.

  “Would you?” she asked, those brown eyes begging. “Please?”

  “Fine. For you.” Lock stood, walked out of the medical center and around the building until he caught the feline’s scent. He followed.

  Gwen lounged on that tree limb, panting softly and enjoying the fresh air.

  She detested hospitals. The way they smelled, the off-white or green painted walls, and that lingering vibe of death. Okay, so she hadn’t been in an actual hospital this time but close enough. If there were doctors and nurses, she was in a hospital.

  It drove her mother crazy. Roxy had been a registered nurse for years before she opened her first salon, and two of Gwen’s aunts and several of her cousins had been doctors’ assistants or medical technicians. Roxy had tried to put Gwen on the same track, starting her off as a candy striper. But that after-school job lasted about a day before Gwen took off running and spent the rest of the night throwing up in the bathroom from her full-on panic attack. She hadn’t willingly been back in a hospital since. “Willingly” being the keyword, because Gwen had found herself in hospitals more than once. She’d wake up and boom! There she was. But she was older now and crafty. They couldn’t keep her if she didn’t want to stay. No matter how much her leg hurt or how weak she felt from blood loss, she wasn’t going back to that death motel.

  Of course, no worries on that. Not with her so high up. And even if they found her, they’d never get her down from here. Even Brendon, cat that he was, couldn’t climb a tree.

  Gwen rested her head on her folded arms and began to drift off to sleep.

  “Comfortable?”

  “Hmm,” she answered. She liked that voice. It was so low. She could imagine waking up to that voice every day, with it whispering that breakfast was ready or asking her if she wanted to share the shower. She could imagine all sorts of dirty things to be done with soap if that voice was involved. And yet…why was that dirty, sexy voice so close?

  Gwen opened her eyes and blinked several times. His arms were folded on her tree limb the same way hers were and his head rested on them as he watched her with those beautiful brown eyes.

  “Christ, how tall are you?”

  He scowled. “It’s not that I’m so tall, Mr. Mittens, it’s that you’re not that high up.”

  “Bullshit.” She had to be like, forty feet up. Maybe even fifty! Right? She glanced down. Wrong.

  Still, she wasn’t exactly lying on the ground either. “You’re like seven feet tall, aren’t you?”

  “I am not seven feet tall,” he snapped at her as if she’d really insulted him. “I’m six-eleven.” When she smirked in disbelief, he added, “And three-quarters.”

  “And that quarter inch makes such a difference, too.”

  “That’s it. I’m taking you back to the medical center.”

  Like hell.

  As the grizzly reached for her, Gwen unleashed her claws and quickly scrambled up higher. She knew for a fact that grizzlies couldn’t climb trees, either. So there! She was totally safe. She’d simply stay here until she healed up and then she’d head on back to the safety of her Philly streets.

  “You’re being ridiculous,” he called up to her.

  “I’m not going back there to die. I can do that just as well out here, in the fresh air.” With all her organs intact in her decaying body.

  “If you go back to the medical center you’re not going to die.”

  “Like I’ll believe that lie for two seconds.”

  “And what about when the fever hits? You??
?re going to fall out of that tree eventually.”

  Gwen couldn’t help but get kind of smug. “The O’Neills don’t get the fever.”

  “Don’t even try it.”

  “We don’t. My brother got shot three times two months ago, and he didn’t get the fever.”

  “I bet your family gets shot at a lot, huh?”

  “Hey, hey!” Gwen said excitedly. “Look at this! Look at this!” She extended her arm and gave him the finger.

  “I should leave your Philly ass up there!” he snarled.

  “Like I’d ever need help from some Jersey rich boy!”

  “Look, Mr. Mittens—” and Gwen didn’t think she could explain how much she hated when he called her that “—either you get your ass down here or I’m getting you out of that tree the hard way.”

  “You have an enormous head,” Gwen taunted, enjoying the way his entire body tensed. “It’s like a giant kumquat.” Then she giggled hysterically, liking the word “kumquat” way more than she should.

  “You want it that way,” he said low, “you’ve got it.” He stepped back and pulled off the hospital scrubs he’d been wearing. She only had a moment to wonder why he was getting naked—and enjoying that astounding view for all it was worth—before he shifted to bear. His height increased considerably once he did, going from his nearly not-quite seven feet to a full ten, but she was still too high for him to reach.

  Leaning over, she taunted, “Nice try but no—”

  Gwen squealed, gripping the branch she was on. He didn’t try and climb up to her, he simply took firm hold of the old tree and began to shake it. Christ, how much did she guess he weighed as bear? Fifteen hundred pounds? Maybe more? And all of it pure muscle. With his claws gripping the trunk, he simply shoved the tree back and forth. It was an old tree—sturdy, strong, and disease free—but it still wasn’t strong enough to stand up to the grizzly, the roots beginning to tear from the ground as he relentlessly kept up his actions.

  “Stop it!” Gwen yelped, but he ignored her.

  The tree, loose from its anchor in the ground, swung forward, Gwen’s lower half flying free of the branch and dangling in midair. She yelped again, and the tree came swinging back. Her body already weak, her hands lost their grip on the tree and she went headfirst toward the ground.

  She closed her eyes, not wanting to see that last second of her life. Yet the bear again showed how fast he was for his size, plucking her out of the air and pulling her in tight against his body. She wrapped her arms around his neck, her hands resting on the giant lump of muscle between his shoulder blades.

  Gasping for breath, she clung to him, burying her face against his neck. She felt his fur recede, his body straightening as it shrunk down to its only slightly less freakishly tall height, while the dramatic hump between his shoulder blades grew smaller and smaller until she could only feel it as several extra layers of muscle. He began walking, briefly stopping to pick up the scrubs.

  “I can’t go back,” she whispered against his neck, horrified she couldn’t stop the shaking of her body.

  He stopped, the tree he’d taken her from crashing to the ground behind them, and gently asked, “What are you afraid of?”

  “Dying.”

  He stroked her side with his fingertips and she was surprised at how gentle his hands were. How gentle he was, considering he’d torn an eighty-year-old tree out of the ground and she’d told him he had a kumquat head.

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “You can’t promise that. They’re going to get me on that table and they’re going to start cutting me open and they’re going to—”

  “Hey, hey.” He leaned back a bit, trying to catch a glimpse of her face. “Wait a minute. Where’s my tough Philly girl?”

  “Dead, if you take me back there.”

  “Do you really think I’d let anything happen to you? That I’d let anyone hurt you? After everything I’ve done today to keep you breathing?”

  “I’ll be alone with those sadists and you’ll be in the waiting room.”

  “I’ll stay with you.”

  “They won’t let you.”

  His smile was so warm and soft, she found herself wanting to trust him when she barely trusted anyone.

  “Do you really think anybody can force me to do anything?”

  “Another bear?”

  “You’d have to find one who cares,” he whispered. “Most of us don’t. But we do keep our word. It’s the MacRyrie bear way.”

  “You promise you won’t leave me?”

  “I promise.”

  With her free hand, she clutched his shoulder with what was left of her strength. “Tell me something about yourself. So I know I can trust you.”

  “Um…I was a Marine.”

  “No. Not that. Something else. Something…just about you.”

  “I do a little woodworking.”

  “Like birdhouses? Whittling?”

  “Okay.”

  “And what else? Tell me something private. Something no one else knows.”

  He thought a moment before he lifted her closer and Gwen couldn’t believe how good his skin felt dragging against hers. Whispering against her ear, he confessed, “When I’m really stressed out…I play with my toes.”

  Gwen leaned back a bit and stared at him. “Seriously?”

  “It’s really relaxing and very bearlike.”

  And very weird. And yet…“I’m oddly comforted by this information.”

  “When this is all over, I’ll show you how to do it.”

  She gave a little laugh, her eyelids trying to close. “There’s a specific way to do it?”

  “If you want maximum benefit.”

  “Oh. Well, then…”

  “I’m going to take you back now, okay?”

  She tensed up but she could no longer fight her desire to sleep. “But you won’t leave me?”

  “I promise.”

  “And you won’t let them kill me or remove any of my vital, healthy organs to sell on the black market? Or exchange my vital, healthy organs with crappy, full-human ones?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Okay.” She snuggled in closer, her nose against his neck, breathing in his scent. “I have your word?”

  “You have my word.”

  “’Cause where I come from, your word means something.”

  “And you’ve got it. I won’t leave you, Gwen. I promise.”

  “And you’ll stop calling me Mr. Mittens.”

  “Let’s not ask for the world, okay?”

  And even as she felt him taking her back to that death trap, she still managed to smile.

  CHAPTER 4

  The doctor wasn’t remotely happy that Lock wouldn’t leave, but once he started tossing his sister’s name around, she backed off. As the top neurosurgeon at McMillian Presbyterian in Manhattan, Dr. Iona MacRyrie’s name held definite clout, and Lock wasn’t above using it when necessary.

  The surgery went well, but the damage to Gwen’s leg went beyond typical Pack harassment. There’d been real intent behind that wound and, although the unknown She-wolf may have made Blayne her first target, it had been Gwen who had really set her off. Maybe it was the cat-dog thing, Lock didn’t know or care. He simply knew that no matter how much that idiot lion glared at him from behind the glass of the operating room doors, he wasn’t leaving.

  Maybe Gwen was being irrational—okay, she was being irrational—it didn’t matter. He’d made a promise, given his word, and he hadn’t been joking. MacRyries kept their word. That had been drummed into him by his uncles since he was a kid. They’d felt the need to help raise Lock because, to quote them, “Your father’s kind of a pansy, know-it-all. You’ll need us to give you the basics about life.” At five, he didn’t know what they’d meant, but by his early teens he understood that “pansy, know-it-all” translated into “college-educated.” And his father’s position as a highly respected university professor of literature and philosophy? Simply a fancy way of sayin
g, “no real job.”

  Strange thing was, they didn’t feel the same way about Lock’s mother. “Your father’s saving grace” was what they called Alla Baranova-MacRyrie, Ph.D. Although a third-generation Russian-American, Alla was a direct descendent of the Kamchatka grizzlies of the Russian Far East. Tougher shifters one would never meet. There was only a small group of them in the States, but their bloodline was well-known and they were more feared than the Kodiaks.

  In the end, though, none of that mattered to either of his parents. They were intellectuals and raised their children to be as well. Iona turned out perfectly. Brilliant, pretty, and married with three cubs, she was in medical school before she was old enough to legally drink. And only recently turning thirty-five, she was head of her entire department.

  Lock, however, was pretty much…average. He didn’t need a lot to make him happy. Fresh salmon, imported honey, and doorways that he could clear without having to duck usually did it for him.

  “I think she’s starting to wake up,” the nurse said.

  Lock stood and walked over to Gwen’s bed. She was covered from neck to legs by a blanket, but he discovered when he pushed her hair off her forehead that she was cool to the touch.

  “No fever.”

  “Yeah. That’s what her friend said would happen.” The nurse talked while quickly and expertly cleaning up the operating room. “Her Pride doesn’t get the fever. Weird, huh?”

  Things could be weirder.

  “Gwen?” he called out softly when he saw her eyelids flutter. “Gwenie?” Her head rolled to one side. “Mr. Mittens?”

  Her lip curled up as she snarled and her head rolled back so she could open her eyes and glare at him. “Stop calling me that,” she whispered.

  “But you’re as cute as a Mr. Mittens,” he teased. “Like a little house cat.”

  “Bastard,” she mumbled, her eyes closing again. Then she was out.

  “Is she supposed to drop like that?”

  The nurse glanced at her and went back to her work. “It’s normal for her, according to her friend.” And typical that only the nurses listened to the helpful friend while the doctor almost got choked to death because she thought she knew better. “They really need to do more research on hybrids. Less chance of the doctors getting their throats torn out if we knew what we were dealing with.”