Bear Meets Bride (R) - Amy Star Page 0,28
turned her head away from him again. “Don’t look at me.”
He flinched but couldn’t help resisting a smile. Suzy often had done the same thing, as if not being able to see something negated its existence. Whether that meant hiding her face during a scary movie at the cinema, or turning away so that other people couldn’t identify the pain written on her face. He went rigid and removed his hand. Suzy. It’d been years since she’d died, and yet the specter of her memory still haunted him. Sweet Suzy, whom he’d met during his initiation.
This isn’t Suzy, he reminded himself shamefully. This is Sarah, Dylan’s mate, knock of your sentimentalism old man. He finished off the food on his plate and his stomach growled in response, grateful for the nutrients. The process of healing, especially for shifters, took a lot of energy, and he had been in a fever dream for nearly two days. He realized now that he was still ravenous.
“Give Dylan my compliments,” he said, trying to lighten the mood, and succeeding, barely. “Listen, we’re all fine, okay? Look at me…” he touched her hand again until she looked at him with those deep cavernous eyes. “All alive, and hungry as a bear oughta be, right?”
She chuckled at his casual demeanor. “Fair enough. I’ll stop worrying… but I think we should try and figure out what we’re going to do, if they come back.”
Or when, he thought judiciously, but covered it with an assenting nod. “Agreed, we should-” he almost choked on his own spittle when he realized what they had overlooked. “The radio! The satellite radio!” Sarah was almost startled off the bed by his exclamation. She gaped at the man the way one might gape at a wild dog – unsure whether it will lick your hand or bite your throat. Chris coughed and tried to clear his throat. “Sorry… just, when you’ve been living without conveniences for such a long time, you tend to forget they even exist… there’s a satellite radio, in my closet. Use it to contact the mainland but only in an emergency.”
Sarah obediently went to the closet and pulled out the Army green plastic-shielded satellite phone. It was bulky and heavy, in the same way that Chris was, and she thought they made a suitable pair. “I think this qualifies as an emergency,” she said, and turned it on. “There’s… there’s no signal.”
He nodded. “Takes… awhile, sometimes, to get a signal.”
“Well, this is the first bit of good news we’ve had in awhile,” she said out loud.
Meanwhile, Dylan was busy patrolling the winding trails that led over the island. The island itself wasn’t huge but it was big enough that if you didn’t know the lay of the land you could end up getting lost quite easily. Tall groves of pale-trunked cedars littered the underbrush, reaching high into the sky with their lofty boughs, interspersed here and there with the smooth blood-colored trunks of arbutus that winded in precarious serpentine tessellations. Down by the shoreline the stronger, hardier straight-trunked sequoia stood like sentries, guarding the interior of the island like a windbreak.
Dylan knew all these trees by heart, but more importantly, he knew where they were localized. In the six months he’d spent training his body and his mind to better adapt to the shift from human to bear and back again, he’d come to know the island as well as he knew his own name. All he had to do was speak it, and the topography opened up to him. This morning, he skirted some of the watersheds, the small creeks and streams that speckled the island, many of them dark as well-steeped tea with the bled off tannins of trees. Although, recently, the streams were quite clear. Just wait for the next rain storm, he chuckled to himself.
Chris hated when the water turned a dark brown even though it was perfectly safe to drink (arguably even better, considering it was laced with minerals and vitamins), the older man had a hard time dealing with it. But Dylan had another purpose in tracing the water streams. Here and there, in the wetter patches of mud and lowland grass, grew a number of plants and herbs endemic to the west coast that could be used as a sort of medicine and antiseptic for Chris’ wounds.
In all likelihood, his patron was out of the woods in terms of the infection but he still worried. It took a lot to take a