Gray Back Ghost Bear(2)
She Turned you, and then she left you.
The thought brought a chill up his neck like snow being dumped into the back of his jacket. His arm hairs stood on end, and his scalp itched with instinct. Inside, his bear snarled a warning.
He swallowed his gulp of cold beer and slid a glance over his shoulder.
Yep, there she was.
“Hey, baby,” Tessa said from her seat on the other side of his two-person dining table. “Did you miss me?”
“What are you doing here?” he gritted out, closing the refrigerator door so he could lean on it casually and pretend he wasn’t staying as far away from her as possible.
“You know what I’m doing here, lover. I’m here because you want me to be.”
“No.” Jason shook his head slowly. “I really don’t.”
Tessa’s copper-colored hair twitched with her empty laugh, and her hazel eyes turned icy. “Liar.” She tapped her forehead. “I can hear your lies. I always knew you best, baby.”
“Don’t call me that.”
Tessa leaned back in her chair and angled her head. She looked predatory with her hard eyes, but then he couldn’t remember her ever looking soft.
“Poor Jason, living with all this guilt. Living in a bachelor crew of crazies and destined to die at his alpha’s hand. Or claw, I should say.” She lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. “A murderer deserves nothing less.”
“Fuck off, Tessa.” Jason gripped the neck of his beer in a strangle hold and headed for the door. He didn’t have to listen to this again.
“You don’t leave until I tell you to leave! Walk out that door, and I’ll come after you. Then what will your precious Gray Backs think when they see you talking to the air? Hmm? What will Creed think when he sees how crazy you really are? Murderer.”
The word brushed across his ears like a frosty wind, and he stopped in his tracks, just in front of the door. “Stop it.”
“Murderer.”
“You left me!” Jason yelled as he turned on her. “You left me for him. You weren’t mine to protect anymore!”
Tessa screamed a blood-curdling sound, her mouth opening wider and wider as her skin melted away from her face. Flesh gave way to muscle, which gave way to blood and bone, and then Tessa was nothing but ash. And then she was nothing at all.
Jason squatted down and covered his ears as the scream faded away.
He was no murderer, but that didn’t stop the haunting.
He’d let his mate down, and now Tessa was caught in the in-between, trapped by the veil that stood between this world and the next.
His mate was dead, but not gone—never gone.
Tessa Trager, his maker, was now his own personal ghost bear.
Chapter Two
She could do this. Georgia was a self-sufficient, outdoorsy, gun-toting, poacher-hunting renegade park ranger descended from a long line of tough-as-steel Ames women. Cattle-women, peacekeepers, and single moms dotted her female heritage, so why was she stopped on the side of the road steadying her hands before she drove the last straightaway into the Grayland Mobile Park?
Because of bear shifters, that’s why.
She wasn’t afraid of much, but she was definitely afraid of bears. Grizzlies to be precise, and her trepidation came from a year-long internship in Alaska assisting a game warden near Kodiak. Now, Kodiak bears were gnarly, gigantic, aggressive animals made entirely of weapons. They were able to smite out a puny human with one slap of their ferocious claws, and here she was about to willingly drive into a camp of registered, real-life bear shifters. She’d sworn up and down after Alaska she would never work around brown bears again. Only koala bears, or little sun bears, or for freak’s sake, black bears sounded like a walk in the park after what she’d seen on Kodiak Island. Yet, she was about to introduce herself to a lumberjack crew of notoriously aggressive grizzly shifters.
They lived way out here in the wilds of Wyoming for a reason. Likely, they didn’t dig visitors, but this was part of the territory she’d signed on to protect, and she wasn’t going to let her boss, Damon Daye, down by pussyfooting around the bear shifters who inhabited the area. Her success as a ranger here depended on a good, professional working relationship with these people-beasts. And dang it all, these jobs were hard to land, and she was ready to settle down somewhere for longer than a year. Her fear of bears was standing in the way of making a home, and she needed to get over it. Fast.
She popped down the visor mirror and studied her pallid complexion. God, she even looked scared right now. She sniffed herself, but she smelled the same way she always did. Powder fresh deodorant and the hair product she used to define her curls, because goodness knows, she needed all the help she could get with her wild sandy-colored mane. Bears could smell things regular people couldn’t, though, and right this very moment, she probably smelled like terror and didn’t even know it.