Callum

I planted my feet on the cool floor at five forty in the morning, the way I had every morning for six years.

The bear under my skin had already rolled over inside me and told me it was time, dragging my body up from the mattress to meet him before my mind had bothered to catch up. I didn’t check the clock anymore. My bear kept better time than any watch I’d ever owned, and six years of waking to the same internal pull had worn the habit into bone.

The bedroom was still dark, but the wall of windows along the eastern side of the loft framed a pre-dawn gray that hadn’t yet decided to become morning. I sat at the edge of the mattress for a beat, and let the change roll through me before I was even fully on my feet.

The change had stopped hurting a long time ago. Sixteen years in the Bureau Apex Division had drilled the flinch out of me. A change slow enough to endure was a transformation that got you killed in the field, so they’d trained us to drop into the animal in under two seconds, and the body had learned to swallow the brutality without protest.

A registered Primordial Alpha was made for one thing, and the Bureau had made the most of us. We hunted Genesis Protocol cells running breeding operations on stolen shifters. We hunted the cartels moving primordial cubs across borders. We killed the people doing the worst of it and disposed of what was left, and we did it because the Bureau owned our blood from the day they put the numbers on our forearms.

Lengthening along the spine and thickening through the shoulders, I pushed my jaw forward, and the world flattened into scent and sound and the warmth of every living thing within half a mile of the house. By the time I crossed the wide plank floor of the great room on four paws, the man I’d been a blink ago was a quiet thing tucked behind the animal’s eyes.

I padded down the open staircase and across to the side door I’d built specifically for this. It was wide enough to clear my shoulders in bear form and hinged so it would swing without catching on fur. I pressed the latch with one paw and the door eased open onto the wraparound porch.

The freezing morning reached me first.

Greyhollow sat far enough north that fall didn’t arrive the way it did elsewhere. Here, the season turned overnight. One morning, the maples were still green, and the next, I stepped out into a forest of wet bark and decaying leaves, with the first cold edge of frost waiting under the topsoil. This was that morning.

I breathed it in, and my bear rumbled in pleasure.

I dropped off the porch onto the path I’d worn into the earth and started the loop.

The property was big, bigger than one man needed by a long stretch. I bought enough of it that the nearest neighbor sat a forty-minute walk through trees nobody else owned. No one walked onto my land without me knowing about it first.

I’d bought it outright six years ago, the same year the Bureau decided I was no longer fit for the field and retired the survivors of my unit alongside me. Sixteen years of hunting Genesis Protocol and burying men I’d trained beside had left me too broken to point at the next target, and the Bureau didn’t keep broken assets on the books.

I moved through the trees and let the patrol settle me.

Birds erupted ahead of me as I went, the way they always did, scattering up out of the underbrush in panicked bursts I’d startled out of them a hundred times before. The forest knew me, and it made room.

Partway down the slope, I let the bellow out. A call from somewhere deep in the chest asking the woods if there was anyone else out here who walked on paws like ours.

What didn’t come back was an answer.

I’d stopped expecting it to, mostly, but the animal in me had not, and the animal in me never would.

Six years, and not once had anything bellowed back. Northern Maine had black bears, plenty of them, especially this close to the Canada border. But I was a grizzly, and none of them were primordial.

I was the only one of my kind for a thousand miles in any direction.

The solitude itself didn’t hurt the man. Bears were solitary by nature, content to walk a territory alone and answer to nobody. Primordial blood, man and bear both, was built to mate, and the hunger for it lived too deep in us to ever go quiet.

I told him, the way I told him every morning, that we weren’t in the market for a mate. We’d already buried one. We didn’t deserve another.

He believed me about half the time. The other half, he kept listening anyway.

I picked up the pace and cut through the stand of old growth that ran down toward the river. The slope dropped off here, and I moved from soft duff under my paws onto wet rock as the trees thinned and the river came up to meet me. It ran cold and fast this time of year, the way Maine rivers always did this close to first frost. The whole of it ran through my property for a stretch of about two miles before crossing onto the federal side, which meant the fishing along this bend belonged to me and nobody else, which was the way I preferred it.

I came out of the trees onto the gravel bar. The Atlantic salmon were running.

The salmon were going bronze along their flanks as they pushed upstream to spawn. September into October was the peak of it. By November, the run would thin, and by December, the bears who still cared about hibernating would be denning down.

I waded into the shallows, and the cold of the river bit through the fur and the thick layer of fat. I planted my paws on the gravel and lowered my head over the surface.

Atlantic salmon were fast. They moved in flashes, dark backs cutting between the rocks, and the trick was patience. A flash of silver moved through the shadow of the boulder upstream from me. I let it pass. The next one came thirty seconds later, holding its line just under the surface, and I struck.

I closed my jaws on it behind the gills. The fish thrashed once, hard, and then went still. I lifted my head and the salmon came with it, water sheeting off the both of us, and I trudged out of the river onto the gravel and pinned the fish under one paw while I caught the next breath.

I clamped down on the salmon again and started back up the slope.

The house came into view through the trees. Two stories of dark cedar siding and steel, floor-to-ceiling windows along the eastern face, a wraparound porch set into the hillside.

I came up the path and dropped the salmon onto the cedar slab I kept on the porch rail for this purpose. Then I returned to my human form.

The change came easier on the way home than it did going out. I found my human shape and drew the fur back under skin. I came up on two feet in the same place I’d set the fish down. The freezing morning bit against me hard now without the coat, and the cold reached me at the soles first and then everywhere else.

I pulled my gray sweatpants off the wooden bench by the door where I’d left them the night before and dragged them up over my hips.

I picked up the salmon and the knife from the post by the door and cleaned her right there. Six years of this same routine had made the work something I did without my mind needing to be involved. Slit, gut, rinse. The roe came out in a red mass and went into a steel bowl for later. The guts went into the bucket for the compost pile and I rinsed off and went inside.

The kitchen ran the length of the great room, an island down the center and a gas range I’d paid more for than I’d admit. I set the salmon on the prep counter, washed up at the sink, and put the kettle on the burner while I ground the coffee beans for the press, the same black, unsweetened brew I’d been drinking since basic training and would keep drinking until I died.

The kettle whistled and I poured, letting it steep the four minutes it needed to be drinkable while I stood at the eastern windows and looked out at the treeline coming up out of the dawn. For one long moment I let my mind go quiet, and the bear in my chest rested his head on his paws and rested with me.

My phone pinged from the kitchen island behind me.

I let it sit while I pressed the plunger and poured my cup. The first coffee of the morning was one of the few honest pleasures I had left. I took it standing at the window, the heat of the mug working into my palms, the bitterness at the back of my tongue. Then I set the cup down and picked up the phone.

Seven missed calls.

I read the screen twice to make sure I had the count right. All Jonas. The earliest one logged at four twelve in the morning, and the most recent at five fifty six, which meant he’d been calling me while I was still standing in the river with a salmon in my teeth.

I frowned at the phone.

Jonas didn’t call me at dawn. He’d been on the wrong side of midnight for most of his adult life and considered any hour before ten a personal offense, and he knew my routine well enough to leave me alone in it. Twenty-two years of sleeping in the same barracks and the same field tents and the same hideouts in countries the Bureau never admitted to having men in had taught us each other’s schedules better than our own. A call from him before sunrise meant something had gone sideways.

I hit the call back and he picked up before the first ring finished.

“Why the fuck didn’t you answer?”

“Why are you even asking that question?”

He let out a breath that was half a laugh and half exasperation. I heard him moving around on his end, the click of a keyboard, the fan of one of the four monitors he kept running in that bunker he called an apartment.

“Right. Papa Bear on his nature walk. Communing with the trees. Catching his own breakfast like it’s eighteen fifty out there. I forget sometimes that you’re a fucking caveman, Cal.”

“You called me seven times.”

“I called you seven times because I was trying to get your caveman attention.”

“You have it. What’s the problem with Maren’s papers?”

“There’s no problem with Maren’s papers. I told you last night they were done. I sent the files to your printer ten minutes ago. You can pick them up whenever you wander past the office. The documents are clean, the bus ticket is queued, and the contact in Winnipeg is expecting her by Friday. Maren is handled.”

I set the coffee down on the kitchen island and dragged a hand over my face.

“Then why are you calling me?”

He held off for a moment. “Genesis Protocol has a new target.”

I remained silent. Jonas knew better than to ask for my help on that front.

“Came across the wire about three hours ago. They had a retrieval operation set up in Florida, of all places, and it went bad on them. The target slipped before the team locked him down. Now they’ve got a tagged shifter loose in their system and a whole network looking for him, and an open bounty went live on the channels I monitor.”

Pinching the bridge of my nose, I said, “Tell me you didn’t contact him, Jonas, because you have a bad habit of playing hero first and calling to apologize to me when it goes bad.”

“I just gave him a way out,” Jonas answered, not sounding sorry at all.

“What does any of that have to do with me?”

“He’s a bear, Cal.”

I held very still. The bear in my chest, who’d been resting his head on his paws three minutes ago, had picked up his head.

“There are almost no bears left, Cal. You know that better than anyone alive. Genesis Protocol has been hunting your kind for a long time. A bear coming up on their radar that they didn’t put there themselves is not a thing that happens. Not in the last decade. And the moment Genesis Protocol gets a fix on him, they’re going to take him alive, because alive is what they want bears for, and you and I both know exactly what they want him for.”

“Jonas.”

“Male omega. Unregistered. Mid twenties. Puerto Rican descendant, working as a bartender in Orlando. His name is Santiago Vega. I sent you the bounty. Look at him, Cal.”

“No.”

“Just open the file.”

“No.”

“Look at his face and then tell me you’re not interested.”

Closing my eyes, I shook my head at the monitors. “I’m not interested. I don’t do retrievals. The unit doesn’t do retrievals because there is no unit, in case you’ve forgotten the part where the Bureau pensioned us out and took our credentials. Our handler only looks the other way on the condition that we stay strictly off the grid. We do papers. We do escape routes. We do exits for people who walk to us on their own two feet and ask.”

“He’s a bear.”

“You said.”

“There are almost none of you left.”

“You said that too.”

Jonas went quiet on his end. I heard him pulling a harsh breath through his teeth. “You’re being a stubborn prick.”

“Then find somebody else. There are people who do retrievals. Hand him off. We’re out.”

I hung up on him and set the phone down on the counter harder than I’d meant to.

The coffee in my other hand had gone cold while I was on with Jonas, and I took another pull of it anyway. Bitter and flat across the tongue. I set the mug down and picked the phone back up.

The bounty file loaded the moment my thumb hit the screen.

Fuck.

He was beautiful.

Whatever I’d been expecting Santiago Vega to look like, it hadn’t been this. The photo at the top of the file showed him in motion, dancing somewhere with colored lights washing across his face. Dark curls fallen across his forehead. Silver glitter on his cheekbones and along the line of his collarbone. A smile so wide and so open it took up his whole face, like the camera had caught him in the middle of laughing at something.

He looked like a little spice of joy.

I locked the screen, set the phone face down on the counter, and braced both hands against the edge.

The bear in my chest came up off his haunches, all of him suddenly awake.

My claws came through the tips of my fingers before I’d decided to let them. They scored four white lines into the stone of the counter beside the phone, and I dragged in a breath and made him sit back down. It took longer than it should have.

This wasn’t my fight. I’d already lost one mate. I wasn’t fit to save anyone else.

I told the bear that.

He didn’t believe me, and he didn’t have to.