Chapter 82: Inseparable

Daphne

“We’re going out to Rutberg today to help in the search,” Byron announced over breakfast.

I set my coffee down with a thump that made poor Bella flinch. “I’m going with you.”

“No, Daphne, you are staying here. It’s not safe.” Wyatt said, using his big-brother-knows-best tone of voice, which was absolutely infuriating.

“I’m going,” I said, standing up from the table. “With or without you. You and those bears have been at this for days. I can help. I’ve done a lot of hiking in those woods, I know the area better than they do. Better than you do.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Byron insisted, although he had a harder time taking a hard line than Wyatt.”

“Bella?” I sent a pleading look to my friend, who was not only my sister-in-law, but also the Luna, so her word held a lot of weight, even against my brothers. “Back me up here.”

Bella held baby Liam in one hand, while she sipped from a cup of tea in the other. Liam was gnawing at a bit of banana, and had it smeared all over his face, hands and clothes, and yet somehow Bella managed to stay clean. She took her time to savor the tea, and then set it back down, slowly and deliberately on the saucer. “I’m going, too.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Wyatt started to raise his voice, but Byron shot him a warning glance, and he immediately modulated his voice. Bella still sometimes had a viceral reaction to violent behavior, even if it wasn’t intended to hurt or to harm. “That woman already tried to hurt you once, you can’t–”

“I can,” Bella waived to Hailey, who came quickly to take the baby out of her arms. “You aren’t going to find an assassin who doesn’t want to be found. “What you need,” she smiled softly, like she was telling a bedtime story to the baby, instead of making plans to capture a murderer, “Is live bait.”

“Bella, no!” Byron grasped her hand. “Please, you can’t risk yourself. We need you, Liam needs you, this pack needs you. We can’t allow you to put your life in danger! We’ve got this cover, the bears and —”

Bella shook off his hand, and in the blink of an eye, her sweet demeanor turned hard. “I wasn’t asking your permission, Bryon. I’m going with Daphne. We’ll meet you there,” She stepped away from the table and walked confidently to the double doors at the exit.

“Oh, hell yeah!” I stuffed one last bite of muffin in my mouth, washied it down with a swallow of coffee, and bolted from the table to follow Bella. She kind of reminded me of a chihauaua. Small and cute, and sweet, until she wasn’t. Then she was a fierce, vicious, unstoppable force of nature.

I followed her to her bedroom and followed her inside. Once upon a time, she would have been shy about changing her clothes in front of me. She used to be so ashamed and embarrassed about the scars that criss-crossed her back, but now she wore them like a badge of honor.

She yanked on a form-fitting camo-t-shirt and strung a belt through a pair of cargo pants. “Are you sure, Bella? I mean, I appreciate you, but this really isn’t your fight.”

Bella scraped her black-cherry hair back into a ponytail and securited it with an elastic. “When a shifter is murdering innocent people, it’s everybody’s fight,” she corrected me. “Besides, its kind of my fault. I was the one who begged your brothers to let her go that day. If it wasn’t for me… well. She wouldn’t be around to cause trouble, now, would she?”

“Oh Bella, this isn’t your fault,” I rushed toward her, but she held up her hand to stop me.

“I’m not wallowing in in guilt, Daphne. Now let’s go, before the boys try to stop us for real.”

She didn't need to tell me twice. The sooner we found Kodi and secured the university, the sooner I could get back to Nate.

**********

Two of the bear-shifters were already out with other warriors from our pack, checking the White Rocks area.

We were with the other two at a bed-and-breakfast just a few miles from the university. We had maps of the state forest spread out on the table before us. Sections that they had already searched had been X’d off, and here and there were some little circles with question marks where the bears had found tracks or other evidence of a bear in the area.

Bart was a giant of a man with a big bushy beard who reminded me of Rubeus Hagrid from the Harry Potter Movies. The other one, Oliver, looked like an your average, good looking professional wrestler. His muscles were so bulgy that he couldn’t put his elbows down next to his sides. He was cute, but not exactly my type.

I only had eyes for one man these days. Everything else was just, meh.

But I couldn’t help it if all male bears were so…beefy.

“I was thinking we could try here, beside the lake,” Bart ran a finger along the shores on the east side.

I leaned closer and shook my head, “No, there’s a hiking trail that runs along the shore of the lake on that side, and there’s very little land between the trail and the road. There’s hardly any tree cover. If we’re going to search the lake, we should do it on the west side. It butts up against state forest land here. There’s another popular hiking trail here,” I showed the place on the map, “That leads up to some beaver ponds. But I’ve never gone off the trail to explore the rest of the area.”

“We should split up, to cover more ground,” Oliver suggested.

“Bella stays with us,” Wyatt said, wrapping a protective arm around Bella’s slender shoulders.

“Of course, I’ll take her then,” Bart gestured toward me.

“Nothing like being the last person picked for the dodgeball team,” I muttered, but I was only joking.

“If you three go up the road toward the quarry, you can start at the top of that ridge and work your way down. We’ll take the access road to hiking trail and start from the bottom, working our way up. Perhaps we will sandwich her in between.”

“That’s a good plan,” I said. “The terraine to the North is swampy, and to the south there a busy road and all those vacation houses along the lake. She wouldn’t want to expose her self, I think she would stick to the woods for cover.”

“Let’s start there then,” Oliver carefully folded up the maps and placed them inside a ziplock bag for safe keeping. He gave me a grin, “You are riding with us, beautiful.”

I slid into the back seat of their SUV, and we headed out to the sister lakes. The larger of two lakes, Bonny, was all developed, with expensive lake-houses and vacation rentals crammed all along her shores. But the smaller lake was part of the state forest, and most of it was wilderness. We bumped down a dirt road, and then turned onto an even small, unmaintained track that led to the trailhead at the inlet to the lake. We parked and walked over the small foot bridge to the west side.

Bart was staring down at the trail as we walked. “Too many tracks,” he said with a frown, “A stegosaurus could have passed here last night, and you’d never know it.” Once we reached the far side of the lake, we left the trail, and began making our own way around the shore line. It wasn’t an easy walk, as the lake shore was uneven, in some places it was steep slate drop-offs into shallow water, in other places it was marshy swamp. The underbrush grew thick and dense, and my legs soon grew weary from climbing the steeper hills.

The bear shifters, although they moved rather slowly, never seemed to tire. When we had walked the entire length of the lake, they moved slightly inland and started back again. About a mile in, Bart held up his hand. “Got something,” He said, moving to examine the trunk of a large sugar maple. The bark along one side, about shoulder height was all torn up. It looked for all the world like a giant cat had tried to sharpen its claws on the tree trunk.

“A bear did that?” I asked, looking at the markings.

“Yep,” Bart ran a finger along one groove. “To sharpen their claws, or to leave a message, or maybe to get at the sap underneath,” he explained.

“So which one is this?” I asked, stepping back. I saw no pattern in the slash marks, it just looked random.

“Probably just a regular old bear sharpening his claws,” Bart concluded with a shrug.

“Or not,” I said, as I spotted something under some debris at the tree’s roots.

“What do you have there?” Oliver said, peering over my shoulder.

I picked up an M&M’s wrapper.

“Just some trash,” Oliver said, sounding disappointed.

“Kodi has a sweet tooth,” I said pointedly, “I’ve seen her eating these.”

“Wait, let me see it!” Bart took the wrapper and held it to his nose, “It’s fresh, probably in the last three or four days. And you are right… I can smell the sow, though it's very, very faint.” He sniffed it again, deeply, and sighed. “It's been a long time since I smelled a female.”