Bear Run: A Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance (Pine Ridge Bear Shifters Book 1) Read Online Free

might just piss it off.
    “Don’t,” Taggart said, suddenly sounding
angry, but not at her. “I’ll take care of this.”
    “Is it another shifter?” Her heart
slammed fast and hard inside her chest, and she could feel sweat sting her
eyes.
    Taggart didn’t need to answer,
because just then the newcomer seemed to shimmer, and Shift, and a second muscular naked man stood where a
huge grizzly had been just moments ago. Alice could only stare. This one wasn’t
as handsome, though. He was a grim-looking, snarling fellow, with huge muscles
cut with all manner of curling scars, and his eyes were narrowed into
mean-looking slits.
    “Traitor!” he called. “Betrayer!”
    Taggart’s chest swelled out. “Get
out of here, Deke, or I’ll tear you apart.”
    Deke, if that’s who the newcomer
was, spat on the ground, as if to show his contempt. “You can try,” he snarled.
As if against his will, he seemed to force the words out: “Kane says if you
come back willingly he’ll only bleed you. If you make us drag you back, he’ll
break your back legs so they’ll heal crooked and you’ll have to crawl for the
rest of your days.”
    Taggart bunched his hands into
fists. “I’m never going back.”
    Deke grinned, but it was a hard,
nasty grin. “I hoped you’d say that. See, I’d rather just kill you now. That
way I won’t have to listen to you whine with your legs broken for the next
however-many years.” His spiteful gaze raked over Taggart’s shoulder to settle
on Alice. “Is this the whore you’ve left us for? Where’d you meet her? Never
mind, it doesn’t matter. Just know that once I’m done with you I’ll make her
mine.”
    Angrily, Taggart stepped forward,
and the air shimmered around him. Alice cried out as a giant bear seemed to
explode from inside him, all claws and fangs and bristling brown fur. She was
so startled she almost squeezed the trigger of her rifle—not that she would
have hit anything. It was pointing idly at a tree, so the worst she could have
done was kill a squirrel. And waste her last shot.
    Taggart, now a terrible grizzly
bear, lumbered out into the glade, and Deke, changing shapes, met him. The two
titanic bears slammed into each other, hard, and Alice swore she could feel the
ground shake beneath her when they hit. She could only cringe as Deke’s fangs
sank into Taggart’s shoulder right where the bullet had gone earlier. New
streams of blood cascaded down his shaggy hide. Taggart slammed Deke back,
raking him with long, terrible talons, biting and savaging him. It was an
awesome fight, the two wrathful bears ripping at each other, blood and fur
flying. Alice realized there would be no quarter given, no mercy granted. These
were two animals, two beasts, a primal fight with only death to end it.
    At last Taggart, having seized Deke
by the back of the neck with his fangs, hurled the other bear against a tree
with such force that the tree cracked. Even as it fell over, Deke slumped at
its side, bloody and dazed. Taggart approached him, surely to tear out his
throat and end it.
    Alice scrambled forward. “No!” she
said. “Wait!”
    Taggart turned to her. He was a
terrible sight, slashed by claws and covered in blood, some of it his own, some
of it Deke’s. His eyes seemed to ask her what she was doing.
    “Don’t kill him!” she said,
approaching. She didn’t know why, but for some reason she didn’t want Taggart
to kill the other shifter like this, with Deke helpless and defenseless. She
didn’t want to see Taggart like that.
    Hardly believing what she was
doing, she put herself between Taggart and the bloody, wheezing form of Deke.
Taggart growled at her in frustration and took a step to the side, meaning to
go around her, but she moved, interposing herself again between the two
combatants. Taggart could have simply knocked her aside, of course, and killed Deke
anyway, but he didn’t. She knew right then she felt something for the strange
bear shifter.
    Behind her