Black Bear Rising: A BWWM Paranormal Romance (Black Bear Saga Book 1) (41 page)

“Who is coming,” I spluttered.

“The clan of the white bears. We have been at war with them for millennia. They are here to break our union, to end the first chance of black and white bears living together peacefully for the first time. We must flee now,” he said as he threw my clothes to me.
 

Seconds later there were two loud knocks on the door. I rapidly pulled on my clothes as Tom opened the glass door to our balcony. The door handle of the room door started to turn slowly and through clenched teeth Tom said, “They have come for you”. He looked wild eyed and desperate and a chill ran down my spine at those words.

I looked over the balcony as my panic began to engulf me. Another couple of seconds and I would be out of control as a panic attack would take hold and make me immobile. We were four floors up and our balcony looked out over the hotels swimming pool.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

Tom gripped my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, “We jump”.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Less then four hours ago my life had been going pretty much according to my plan. My daily routine and set of strict self imposed rules had been followed and I had my usual sense of control and relaxed mind when everything went as expected. That was then and only a few hours ago, right now everything had changed and I could feel my panic rise. If I didn't get it under control I would feel the tightness in my chest as if I was bound in steel and my fingers would start to dig into my palms reflexively. Dark spots began to dance in the corners of my vision and I knew the static shock of panic was about to drown me and blot everything out.
 

Tom stood behind me and wrapped his arms tightly around my waist and pulled me close and almost immediately I could feel the veil lifting. The warmth radiating from him permeated my bones and stripped away the sour taste of panic. I felt safe in his arms but I also didn't want to be around when whatever was on the other side of the door barged through.

Toms lips brushed against my ear and he whispered, “Close your eyes” as he pushed off backwards from our balcony. I kept my eyes open as we fell backwards. Time elongated and slowed as if it was a malleable property. I could hear the whoosh of air past my ears as we began to fall. I noticed a wad of chewing gum stuck to the underside of the balcony railing. The sun glinted off the hairs on Toms strong broad arms. How long would we stay like this? Safe and close in his strong embrace, two souls bound together, finding everything they needed in each other. I felt like a bubble of air trapped inside a frozen lake, pure and perfect.

As we fell I never took my eyes off our balcony and for one split second I wished I had. A man was standing there looking at us fall. He wore a well tailored suit with a long dark scarf around his neck. Perched on his head at a jaunty angle was a hat that looked like something a square jawed father would wear in an advertisement for a car in the nineteen sixties.

There was something off with his face and at this distance it looked wrong. It had a red heat rash pallor to it and then he smiled at me. The bastard actually full on grinned at me as we fell. I caught a glimpse of something metallic in his mouth and then my world was engulfed in water.

We hit the pool at great speed and I choked and gurgled as the weight of my clothes dragged me down. I felt Tom hooking an arm under me and he dragged me coughing from the pool. People stood around us with mouths hanging open. I looked up at the balcony and the man in the suit was gone.
 

I got shakily to my feet and Tom grabbed me by the hand, “We have got to keep moving” he said. We exited the pool area shoving past the circle of onlookers gawping at us.

“Where do we go now?” I asked between gasping breaths.

“My car is two blocks away, when we get to it we need to leave the city right away,” Tom said.

Hand in hand we ran across the small park adjacent to the hotel. I felt heavy and slow in my soaking clothes and I could already feel myself getting cold. Tom pointed ahead and said, “The car is through that gate”.

From the corner of my eye I saw a blur of black as a figure ran straight at us. Tom let go of my hand and pivoted and caught the man around the waist. They both fell hard to the ground in a jumble of legs and arms. They rolled around and the man was on top of Tom and he was snapping his jaws at him as if to bite into him. I caught another flash of something metallic from the assailants mouth.

Tom fought hard, raining punch after punch into the mans midsection. I stood frozen to the spot. They looked like two wild animals trying to rip each other limb from limb. The man ducked under one of Toms punches and he bite into Toms shoulder holding on tight. Tom let out a long guttural growl and punched down hard at the base of the mans exposed neck. The man let go and raised up and then lunged forward at great speed towards Toms neck.

Tom punched his attacker directly into his throat and I heard a sickening crunch and the man crumpled and sagged. All the fight gone out of him. Tom pushed him off and the mans head swung back at an obscene angel. He got to his feet and I could see the colour draining from his face. He grabbed me by the hand and said, “Don't look at him, don't waste your time, he wanted to destroy both of us”.
 

We lurched towards the park gate at a slower speed. Tom was covered in a sheen of sweat and he looked like someone who has come down with a bad dose of the flu. We got to the car and he threw me the keys and said, “There is a safe place we can hole up for the night not too far from there. I’ll direct you, I'm in no fit state to drive right now”.
 

We got in the car and Tom collapsed into the back seat and lay down. His skin had a green sickly tint to it and his body was giving off a strong ripe odour. “What did that man do to you” I asked.

“He infected me. When we get to the safe house I can get some medicine. I’m in your hands now,” he said smiling weakly. He told me the address and we headed off, the place would be around an hour away and out in the countryside. Tom dozed while I drove and every so often he would call out my name as if he were in a fever dream. I reached back and felt his forehead and he was boiling up. What had that man done to him? Had he injected Tom with some sort of virus?

An hour later and after a few minutes traveling down a dirt packed road with weeds growing in the middle we got to the safe house. It was a small cabin surrounded by tall trees in a clearing. An outhouse stood to the left of the cabin and on the right were two small sheds.

I helped him inside as much as I could and he bore down on me with most of his weight. He felt like he was getting weaker by the minute. Inside the cabin it was sparsely decorated with a small kitchen and a bed in the corner. Tom just made it to the bed and then his legs gave way under him and he crashed onto the hard mattress. He weakly pointed at his shoulder and I ripped his shirt back.

The place where he had been bitten was red and raw and blood oozed from it. His flesh was punctured with two circular bite marks and the flesh and skin had been torn
 
as the man had tried to rip the flesh from his body.

Tom placed one of his arms weakly on my shoulders and said, “You have got to get it out of me fast, it’s killing me. Get the metal splinters out of me...”. He trailed off and his hand fell away from mine. His eyes rolled back in his head until all I could see was white. I clenched and unclenched my fingers as I could feel the panic begin to rise and take hold.

I stood up and said firmly out loud, “Not now. Not now”. I could feel the rising swell of panic subside a little and I focused on the task at hand. Tom was dying and I needed to act fast. I went to the kitchen and pulled all the drawers open until I found a sharp looking paring knife. It looked clean and there was no time to worry about sterilising.

I knelt on the floor beside the bed and gripped his blood sodden shoulder in my hand. The wound was no longer red, it was now pale and creamy looking and this paleness was spreading out from the vicious wound.
 

I ran my fingers over his wound and beneath one of the holes buried in his flesh I felt a solid mass. Was it a bullet? Did the man shoot Tom with some sort of silencer.
 
I got the tip of the knife and worked it into the wound. I could feel a horrible prickly sensation in the back of my throat as the blade slide easily into him. I dug around inside the flesh and I could feel tears streaming from my eyes. My lips fluttered as I repeated, “Come on,” over and over again.

The blade tip clicked against something hard. I wedged the tip against it and leveraged it towards the surface. With my other hand I dug in with my fingers and pulled it out. I dropped it on the floor with a metallic click. It looks like he had been shot.

Almost immediately the colour started to come back around the wound and spread throughout his body. I cut off some strips of his shirt and bandaged his arm.

Toms eyes slowly opened and through dry cracked lips he said in a voice barely above a whisper, “Bury it out back, get it out of the house”. I took the bloody bullet off the floor and went out back. Using the knife I dug a little hole in the soft earth. I held the bullet up for a closer look and everything that I had gone through in the last few hours smashed into me. I dropped it to the ground and explosively vomited. My insides roiled and I rolled over onto my back feeling the cool earth against my skin.

It was not a bullet. It was a tooth that had been imbedded in Tom. It was a tooth covered in a shiny metallic layer. I lay there for a few minutes as I slowly came to grips with what all this meant or could mean. I had so many questions flying through my mind.

I got up and covered the metal tooth with some earth and went back inside. Tom was sitting up in the bed and colour was slowly coming back to his pasty skin. He locked eyes with me and said, “Thank you. You have saved my life”. He lay back down and within seconds was sleeping.
 

I cleaned myself up and checked out what kind of supplies we had. While he dozed I prepared us a meal from some of the canned goods in the pantry. While the canned ham sizzled in the pan I heard Tom rouse and stand up. He looked like a new man. The colour was back in his skin, it was hard to believe that only a few hours ago it looked like he was dying.

“I’m going to head out to wash up,” he said grabbing some clean clothes from a dresser. As I cooked I watched him through the side window as he stripped off the rest of his blood soaked shirt. He drew cold water from a hand pump and dumped it over himself. The dried blood ran off him in rivulets. His muscles gleamed and steam rose off him.

I could now see more of his tattoo. His whole upper body was covered in one large piece of art. At the centre stood a gnarled old tree. Hanging from its branches where the corpses of black bears.

The tree stood between two figures. A woman with a ravens head
 
stood to one side of the tree and stood on the other side was a man with a polar bears head. The piece was so ornate and detailed that from this distance I could not make out much more of it. Tom caught me looking at him and smiled broadly as he dumped another bucket of freezing cold water over himself. Thick clots of blood washed off his arm and beneath it the wound was healed. There was a slight red outline where only a few hours ago the bite had been.

Tom motioned at me to turn away as he started to unbuckle his trousers. For second I stood stock still mesmerised by his beautiful muscled body glistening in the sun. I gave him a saucy wink and returned to preparing the food. Even after all the scares I had been through today I could feel myself getting turned on by his naked body. I had once read that fear can be a powerful aphrodisiac. If that was true I was mighty horny now as I pushed the horrors of the day to the back of my mind and let my mind wander.

Tom broke me out of my reverie as he came back in. I got a glimpse of his naked body as he moved across the room and came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me. “I need to thank you for saving my life,” he said as he started to kiss my neck.

His lips brushed across the base of my neck causing satin flutters to intwine me as my skin reacted to his touch. All my feelings for him slammed into me and a small dissenting voice called from a deep dark recess inside me, is this too much too soon? Can you really be falling in love with him already? That tiny spark of doubt was quickly snuffed out by the warm feeling spreading from my groin.

Tom continued to kiss my neck whilst tangling one hand in my hair and the other smoothly moved along the curvy contours of my body. He turned me around and we stood face to face looking into each others eyes. I noticed dark flecks in his pupils and I could feel his lust radiating out from him.

We kissed slow and deep our tongues playfully flicking across each other. Tom gripped me by the hips and lifted me up onto the counter. His kisses started to trail down my body. His hot breath tickled the dimpled flesh of my stomach as his lips caressed and licked expertly across me. Tom forcibly opened my legs and his hands ran up and down my thighs causing sparks to ricochet off in my skull. For a brief second I was self conscious as he began to unbuckle my belt
 
and pull down my trousers and panties. They slide off and fell to the floor. The skin of his hands and face looked pale and glowing against the rich darkness of the soft skin of my inner thighs. He was between my legs slowly kissing my inner knee and moving closer and closer to my pussy, kiss by teasing kiss. This was death by a thousand kisses and I loved it.