It was that time between winter and spring. He’d woken from his hibernation but there was little to eat that didn’t run on four legs. It would be days before the strawberries were delicious and he forced himself to hold back. They were green now, with some turning white. They would taste bitter and terrible. So instead he found one of the beehives he’d been saving for a rainy day.
The bear half of Liam had to acknowledge that the man had some decent ideas. They’d cultivated gardens for eating. Damned rivers to increase the salmon population and made a map of every honey-dripping bee hive within twenty miles. This was all the man’s doing. He liked looking to the future and making plans and talking about time—all things the bear detested. How could they be two sides of the same soul, when they were so different?
Had they always been so different? The bear didn’t think so. It was more likely that the witch’s curse that trapped him forever as a half-bear had driven a wedge through the center of his heart. And like a tree that is split by lightning yet continues to grow, so did the two halves of Liam’s soul grow until neither resembled each other. In being confined by the witch as a half-bear and half-man, a duality had developed. If their flesh couldn’t have two shapes, their heart would.
The walk to the bee hive took an hour. One hour of furred feet squelching in the mud, of rain pelting the tarp that covered his head and upper back, of the probing winds chilling every inch of his skin. But it was worth it.
There was an old oak that lived even though its chest was hollow. The man called this the Honeytree even as the bear scoffed. The hollow in the tree was heart-shaped and huge, nearly as big as Liam himself and a proud old colony of bees had taken up inside it, crafting the hive to end all hives. The tree was technically in the Ravenswood, where the raven shifters of Rook’s Roost used their dark magic to twist trees into unnatural shapes and the arcane energies they poured into the ground made all the plants grow larger and more wild.
The raven’s tricks had changed the bees, too, giving them unnaturally long lifespans and causing them to grow as large as a man’s eye. Stealing honey from the hollow oak had been a goal of his for years, but he also enjoyed not getting stung all over by angry bees with stingers the size of pencils.
Tonight though, tonight was a night for foolhardiness and sweetness on his tongue.
Bees would not—could not—fly in the rain. Not even the swollen braggarts of the honeytree hive could manage that trick. So Liam Half-Bear ate his fill that night, slashing open the hive with his clawed hands and devouring a bellyful of the sweet, magical honey. The bees buzzed at him and tried to fly, but the storm kept them away and Liam laughed in their angry insectoid faces.
Even so, they’d stung him a dozen times around his mouth as he ate. The pain and swelling was worth it though, for the taste of their honey. It was light and creamy with flavor notes of cinnamon and apple and a hint of something dark and earthy in the aftertaste that made him crave more just so he could understand it.
But after eating all he could and after the final bee stung his tongue with its absurdly large stinger, he gave up and went home, trudging through the miles of muddy forest on the way.
There were no scents in the air but the homey petrichor of the rain and the redolent stink of the mud. Liam missed being a man then, and being able to turn off his sense of smell. Sometimes it was just too much. His face ached from the stings and his tongue had swelled up comically large in his mouth, but still he could taste the honey on it so all was as well as well as could be.
He thought nothing could sour the mood of his victory over those arrogant bees, but the storm proved him wrong, and over the course of twenty miles his good cheer faded replaced with a murderous grumpiness that wished for something large and bold to war with.
Finally, he found his way back home, squeezing through the back door of the house and leaving a trail of mud and water on the floor of his destroyed kitchen. He considered trying to start a fire to get warm. Matches were difficult with his half-bear hands, but on a night like this—with the chill creeping into his bones—it would be worth the frustration. He could go into the cottage, he knew. It was always warm and dry in there. And the stove would be easier to light than the half-broken fireplace in his house. But no—the cottage was off-limits. It had belonged to her, his lost love. The name he couldn’t recall and the face he couldn’t see, except in his dreams. He couldn’t enter that cottage until he was a man again. Not until he deserved it.
A sound came to Liam then. It was so rare that it took him a moment longer than it should have for him to place it. It was a human voice—a woman’s voice—and she was talking to herself.
Fury raged through him then, bor
n entirely from the bear’s portion of his soul. How dare someone enter his den? Hadn’t human women already taken enough from him? What more did they want?
The last time a human had come unannounced to the house, it had been a developer looking to tear down his home and build something new and vulgar in its place. What would this one want?
He peered out a broken window with blazing eyes and watched her carefully. She was a curvy thing, ill-dressed for the weather and smelling of fear. She did not seem like a threat at all, but Liam had been fooled before. The man half of him tried to calm the bear, but the moon was full that night and the man could sooner have calmed a river by speaking to it. Suddenly, the pain of the bee stings became more acute and the miserable wetness that hung from him grew heavier. His rage blossomed. Here was a thing he could fight. It would be little contest and he didn’t want to kill her, of course. But to see her face when he roared would please him. To watch her round butt shake as she ran away in terror would also please him.
The intruder circled his home and then, in a terrible affront, entered the cottage.
The man in him tried to hold the bear back, but it was no use. He was all beast that night.
On silent feet he crept out of the house and stalked over to the cottage. He would break the door in. He would drag her out with his teeth around an ankle and hurl her down the road. How dare she enter the cottage? Couldn’t she tell it was meant for someone else? He’d kept it perfect, so that when the she he couldn’t remember returned, she would be pleased with him.
Liam stormed over to the window of the cottage to take one more look at his prey before acting, and witnessed her sitting on the bed, wrapped in a blanket and sobbing.
The sight made Liam stop cold. She wasn’t some scrapper come to steal his house. She wasn’t a thief. She was a person, alone and scared and beautiful, seeking shelter in the night.
There’d be no sport, he decided, in scaring her that night.
Perhaps in the morning, when she awoke, he could drive her away.
He decided to sit, in the rain, and watch her as she slept. He told himself it was so he’d understand her better—so that in the morning when he demanded she be gone, he wouldn’t be blindsided by the sight of her full lips or the way her hair fell across her face like the sun-dappled shadows of trees.
Chapter 3
Rose awoke with a start to the sound of chopping wood.
She blinked and it took her a long minute to remember where she was and what had happened. She was in a cottage, behind an abandoned farmhouse. Yes, that sounded right. She’d been fleeing the sleazy Ronald Carter and had slid off the muddy road.
But what was that noise?