Danil refused to watch her taillights disappear into the night. His heart was stupidly clenched, his skin was too tight and he was literally about to scream. The night called to him and he could smell his brothers on the air.
He skirted around the side of the house, pulling off his shirt and belt as he walked. He spotted the pile of his brothers’ clothes on the back porch and he added his. And then he was running, first as a man, on two legs. And then Danil stretched his arms out before him and they just kept stretching. And he tumbled forward, running on four legs as fur sprouted over his skin. His haunches bunched and expanded, his head grew three times its size and his teeth severed the air as he gave an appreciative huff.
Danil lumbered through the woods, quickly leaving the sparse trees behind and following his brothers’ path up the mountain. He could follow their scent easily, but when they were in bear form, he could also hear their voices in his head, as if they were calling out to him.
With a last, galloping run, Danil burst into a familiar clearing, where they often met after they’d shifted. And there they were, his three brothers.
“Did you kiss her?” Maxim asked. His humongous bear was larger than the other three and a light, honey brown. He wasn’t the most vicious fighter, but his weight and creativity made him a formidable opponent.
“Of course not,” Danil snapped.
“Why of course not?” Emin asked. His bear was smaller and darker, and he was the fastest and had the keenest senses of the brothers. “She was a beautiful woman. Why wouldn’t you kiss her?”
“Because you heard her,” Danil said, his patience thin after the almost-kiss with Dora. Not even the running or the shifting had taken that edge off. “She was asking about Anton.”
Anton stood in the shadows. His bear was almost identical to Danil’s. Chestnut brown and big, they were both vicious fighters, ruthless. Except Anton had a series of scars across his back, and a thatch of bone-white fur down one side. They didn’t like to talk about how he’d come by those features. And now there was this woman, come into their lives and stirring it up.
“So what,” Maxim said, sniffing at a tree. “She can ask questions about the white bear all she wants, it’s not like she knows that it’s Anton.”
“Of course she’s not assuming we’re bear shifters,” Danil said, frustrated. “But I don’t like it. I met her for the first time down at the precinct today. She’d been arrested for trespassing for the second time in two days. And now she comes here, happening to ask about Anton? That’s suspicious to me.”
Anton was quiet in the underbrush. He was as still as a statue, absorbing the refreshing, wild calm of being in bear form. He hated when his brothers worried about him.
Emin looked up at the sky, noting the arc of the moon through the clouds. “We should get back. We’re gone too long, and Mama will worry.”
The brothers agreed with him, though none of them wanted to shift back to their human forms on such a beautiful night. Danil knew that Emin and Anton shifted any chance they could, and were often alone in the woods. But Danil and Maxim typically only shifted once a week at Sunday dinners, when they were all together. He cherished that time.
But they didn’t want their mother to worry, so they lumbered back down the mountain. Sometimes chasing and racing. Sometimes pausing to scent something in the wind. For animals of their tremendous size, they moved as quietly as cats through the pines.
They shifted back at the edge of the tree line, under the cover of the shadows. There weren’t any other houses for a few miles in any direction, but just in case, they wanted a little privacy. Although none of them had any problem walking naked back across the lawn, laughing and shoving and snickering.
They pulled on their clothes on the back porch. Anton froze, sniffing the air.
“AJ is here?” he asked in Belarusian.
“Yeah,” Danil replied, remembering her entrance in vivid detail. How Dora had looked in the tense, pulsing seconds before AJ had interrupted them.
Anton whipped his shirt on. “She walked here alone in the middle of the night?”
“It’s 9:30 on Sunday night,” Emin said, raising an eyebrow at his brother. They were all protective of AJ but none more than Anton.
Ten years ago, Anton, in his bear form, had been the one who’d found AJ in the woods, about to be attacked by a mountain lion. Unsure of what to do after he’d scared off the cat, Anton had brought her home to his mother. And AJ had been like a sister to them ever since. She was the only human in their lives who knew they were bear shifters. But her dramatic entrance into his life had always made Anton sensitive about choices she made.