Alpha Bear Guardian (Awakened Shifters Book 3) Read online

  Alpha Bear Guardian

  Keri Hudson

   Copyright 2020 by Keri Hudson - All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

  Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  Table Of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Other books by Keri Hudson

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sebastian “Bazz” Malloch looked up from his mother’s embrace. She wouldn’t let him go, despite his rising strength and the urgency of his panic. He wanted to shift, but he couldn’t manage it, still too young to control his unique physiology.

  But his father was in the full thrush of his ursine self, big and strong, facing those lupine shifters with the readiness and power of a true hero. His father had always been his hero, and he always would be.

  The lupes had tracked them to a camping spot off the Colorado River. Bazz and his mother could only look on as Bazz’s father took on all five lupes at once. They didn’t seem interested in killing the family; they seemed to know that would be easy enough once they took out the patriarch.

  They had the look of wolves, just as the ursine shifters had the look of bears, but each was much more. The lupes’ faces were longer, more expressive to reveal their human sides. They were much bigger than wolves, and their paws were longer and more like human hands, curling claws like a raptor’s talons.

  Bazz’s father had the look of most ursines: face more human, snout and jaws bigger, arms more human and body more agile. But he had all the power and girth of the biggest grizzly, and even more.

  One big lupe lunged at Bazz’s father, but a hard swipe of his left paw sent the lupe’s head snapping to the side, failing to stop it. Bazz’s father drove the lupe back with a series of jabs and swings of those deadly long, black claws.

  Another jumped on his back, claws digging into his father's thick hide, pulling and digging and boring deeper toward the vital meat and nerves and sinew. Bazz’s father roared out, shaking his head and spinning to access the big lupe. Unable to dislodge him, Bazz’s father rolled over hard and fast. The lupe tried to jump out of the way and very nearly made it. But its hind paw was caught under that massive ursine weight. It yelped out, struggling as Bazz’s father rolled over it, bones crunching, the lupe screaming out in agony.

  But the other four kept coming, one jumping onto Bazz’s father’s belly, boring those deadly claws into his stomach to disembowel him. From the old man's screams, young Bazz knew they had a good chance of doing just that.

  Bazz tried to pull away from his mother, but at just seven years old, there was little he could do. And her desperation to save her son at least gave her the strength to prevent him from committing suicide, however desperate the boy was to do so. To their left, the big river churned, water roaring with a frothy white surface. There was nowhere to run.

  Two other lupes attacked the old man at once. Bazz’s father sent one flying, but the other two bit into his hide and shook hard, growling loudly and pulling at his meat and sinew.

  With a mighty roar, Bazz’s father gathered his strength for another burst of defensive aggression. He kicked one hard, the lupe yelping with the strike and twisting before falling to the forest floor. He rolled to send another scrambling, but it didn’t last long before he turned to lunge at Bazz’s father again. The big ursine shifter heaved one of his attackers up off the ground and threw him at another, both lupes rolling back in a bundle of limbs and jaws and wiry fur. But the lupes weren’t hurt, and they shook the effects of the blow off before getting ready to attack again.

  Bazz’s father recovered and met their attack, a great swat of his left front leg digging into one lupe’s belly, pulling it out and dragging the lupe’s entrails and bowels along with his bloodied claws.

  He tossed the lupe’s body off, but the others were already jumping on him from every angle. One resumed its spot on the old man’s back, biting into his neck. Bazz could almost feel those canines digging into his own neck, shoulders rising up instinctively to protect himself from an attack that wasn’t directed at him.

  Yet.

  One of them screamed as Bazz’s father slashed at its face, skull exposed, facial skin dropping down and exposing the teeth, blood pouring from the wound.

  Bazz finally managed the strength to pull himself from his mother's grip, screaming and flailing his arms at the nearest lupe. It turned and swatted at the boy, the contact hitting him with incredible force and sending him flying back. Young Bazz collapsed in his mother’s arms and the lupe returned his attention to Bazz’s father, struggling and roaring under the drooling, toothy assault of the surviving lupes.

  Bazz’s mother turned toward the river, tears pouring out of her eyes. In turning away from his struggling father, Bazz knew that her mother had accepted his fate, and her own. But the fate of her only son was more important than her own life, and she was more than ready to offer her own up on the off chance that at least the boy would survive.

  With a sad gasp and a tearful, “Goodbye, my love,” Bazz’s mother clutched him tight and threw herself and Bazz into that river. At that moment, even at his tender age, young Bazz knew his father would not survive his final battle, but that was the only rational thought that could survive the rushing water, cold and strong and rolling him and his mother one over the other in a dizzying blur of smothering, briny muck.

  He couldn’t breathe, flashes of daylight replaced by the dark green and blue of the river. But when they rolled up and gave Bazz a view of the surface, he could see at least one lupe chasing after them, running along the river’s edge to keep pace with them.

  The water rushed them faster, numbing and smashing into rocks and boulders. His mother grunted as she held onto him, her arms around him to protect her one and only child. Even in that cold and terrible tumble, he could feel her undying love for him, her commitment to his life above her own as clear as anything he ever knew or ever would know.

  The water seemed to move faster, the riverbed rising up to pound them from beneath with that parade of rocks and stones, the strikes so powerful that Bazz could feel them even through his mother’s body.

  One last roll upward to the daylight, the lupes chasing along the riverbank until they stopped, yelping at them as they went over the falls.

  Their heaving, soaked weight seemed suddenly weightless, hovering in midair for a startling second before gravity took its full toll. They plummeted toward the water waiting below, Bazz’s stomach rising up to press against the bottom of his lungs, driving the air from his body, preparing him for the watery grave that awaited them both. Bazz held his breath as the water
came closer, racing toward him, body to be crushed along with his mother’s, to join their husband and father in heaven.

  Bazz bolted up out of bed, eyes wide, heart pounding, body sheeted in cool panic sweat. He looked around to see the bedroom of his condo. Bazz got his bearings, breath slowing as his senses recovered. He was no longer the tortured child on the day of his father’s death. He was no longer the little boy carried away by frantic and frothing waters to be hurled off the face of the planet and then thrown back down hard.

  I’m not dead, Bazz told himself, I washed up on the banks, I managed to survive… unlike poor Mom and Dad. Never saw either again… Lord, please let them be resting in peace. They’ve earned it.

  I haven’t; not yet.

  Bazz dropped himself back down onto his pillow, damp with his sweat. He knew his past would never relent, that he could never escape who and what he was, where he came from, and where he was going. It brought everything to the fore, as much as he hoped to escape it for just a few precious hours. But the terrible truth of his life came back to him with crystal clarity. It was unescapable, there would be no respite for him. The sins of the father would be the sins of the son. The only question was if Bazz would ever be the hero his father was, if his own death would be as glorious and worthy.

  But it was coming and soon—there seemed little doubt about that.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bazz stood on the side of a steep slope overlooking Boulder, Colorado. His senses were tingling, hairs standing up on the back of his neck. But he sniffed hard, picking up no trace of any nearby lupes, though the area’s actual wolves could be trouble enough. Still, he was well trained to sense them coming, to pick up on the subtle clacks and chatter they exchanged during a hunt. And standing there without moving, he knew it wouldn’t be much of a hunt at all, but an ambush.

  Take it easy, Bazz, he told himself. Just your imagination.

  But it was becoming harder and harder to accept that. It was too easy, and nothing about the coming times was going to be easy. He could sense it in the air, in the behavior of the animals in the zoo. The bears, the wolves, the crocs, every big predator went wild in his proximity. And he knew what it meant.

  He had to find out what effect he had in the wild, and in his human form. He still spent a lot of time among the normalos, those everyday human beings he so wanted to be one of. But destiny had other plans for him, etched in stone since before he was born.

  Bazz had to know how much danger his strictly human friends were in, whether or not the terrible inevitability of having to abandon them had finally come. Bazz looked over the Rockies, a northern harrier spiraling overhead. It was his territory, but he knew that would only bring challengers.

  Lupines, Bazz told himself. They're getting ready, all over the country; I can feel it. Their aggression rings in the trees, it carries on the wind. The great war is coming, shifters of both sorts, wolves and bears, will meet in a global conflict that would determine the new masters of the planet Earth. And if it’s the lupes, the human race is doomed.

  Bazz took a minute to think about his friends, the university, his students, all the aspects of the human world that were good and decent and worth preserving. It was true that the humans had gone too far in a lot of respects, that the planet was going to find some way to correct them eventually. But Bazz knew what was coming would be no mere correction. The lupes were known to keep human women as breeders; it was one of their primary motivations for encroaching on the human world. Breeding would be the key to their success as a race, if they could manage to cultivate a healthy population. But alpha predators were increasingly on the prowl, taking the shifters’ cubs whenever possible. It was all part of the same violent and potentially catastrophic spiral of war that seemed to be strong enough to sweep him up into it, along with the rest of the country, and even the entire free world.

  Bazz spotted the big SUV driving up the mountain road on the next slope, black and boxy. There wasn't much about the SUV that was too out of the ordinary, but something about it captured his instinct. Bazz drove a similar vehicle, which he’d left about half a mile down the hill. Bazz stood on that slope, watching the other big car slow to a stop. The driver and front passenger doors opened and two big men stepped out, bearded and big-bellied. They looked around the area before closing the doors.

  Bazz guessed, Hunters? It’s a bit late in the day…

  Two of the three men walked around to the back of the SUV and flipped it open again. The other pulled a handgun from his belt, visible to Bazz even at that distance, and stood by the car door, clearly a guard. One of the others pulled a young woman out of the back of the SUV, hands behind her back, legs pinned together. She was tape-gagged and blindfolded.

  The third man took her arm and dragged her to the side of the thin mountain road, a few yards from the car. He shoved her down to her knees as the other man dragged a young man, similarly trussed up. He dragged the man, beefy and bearded, also redheaded, to kneel next to the woman.

  Bazz was too far from his car, and the route too indirect, to have any hope of getting to them in time. He knew instantly that his only chance was to shift and fast. There was no time even to strip out of his clothes, as he’d normally do before assuming his ursine form. Instead, he tore right through them. His furry hide bristled with thick, dark hair, massive arms and legs tearing through his pants and shirt. His wallet and car keys fell from his pocket to his feet, already shifting into massive, black-clawed hind paws, ripping out of his boots.

  The three men pulled three more young men from the back of the SUV, all bound and gagged and blindfolded, to be lined up kneeling by the side of the road. Bazz knew what the men intended to do. The only question was whether he could get to them in time.

  Bazz jumped into the chase. Despite his greater size, almost a thousand pounds of bone, sinew, muscle, hide, and hair, Bazz could move with incredible speed and agility, weaving between blue and Engelmann spruce trees, one rotting branch shattering as he blasted past it. His heart was pumping strong, shifter blood pulsing in his veins. It was a rarified concoction, a fluid volatile enough to detonate, the resultant explosion powerful enough to wipe clean the surface of the earth.

  Bang! The gunshot rang out over the hillside, kingfishers and hummingbirds fluttering out of the canopy above him. A deer stag turned and fled the area as Bazz barreled across the slope. His massive paws slid a bit on the thick forest floor, a carpet of rotting leaves and dead critters.

  Bang! The second shot was louder as Bazz got closer, his own growled pant heavy in his lungs, his throat, his ears. The shot was followed by a dull thud, and Bazz knew it was a dead body hitting the ground.

  Execution style, Bazz thought, one shot in the back of the head. Drag ‘em into the woods after and leave ‘em to the wolves. But that was all his reasoning human mind could conjure. As he bore down on them, the ursine part of himself came to the full fore, strength welling up in his arms, claws already flinching to anticipate an exquisite kill.

  Bang! Bazz knew another person had just lost their life, his human empathy vibrating beneath his animal rage. Despite his human affection for the normalos, the ursine in him hated them as much as any lupe did, or even the wolves and orca and natural alpha predators all over the world.

  Man was the bane of the planet, man was bringing imbalance and toxicity and death. But as Bazz charged through the firs and onto the scene, he was the one bringing death, and he was going to enjoy every minute of it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Bazz burst through the junipers, leaping over the hostages both dead and alive. The gunman behind them looked up with the face of sudden terror, his camouflage hunting jacket making him all the more pathetic to Bazz, standing as he was in front of a jet-black SUV.

  Bazz landed squarely on the man, smashing against the SUV, which leaned heavily to the side to absorb the blow. The assassin struggled wildly and screamed in a terrified, high-pitched wail, one hand searching for his lost handgun while the other t
hrew useless punches at Bazz’s huge face.

  Bazz bit down hard on the man’s face, biting down just hard enough to get a solid grip, blood spurting from the puncture wounds and dripping deliciously into his throat.

  In the corner of Bazz’s eyes, he could see the other men standing dumbstruck, one of them already raising a gun to start firing. Bazz knew he was standing between the gunmen and the two surviving hostages, one of them the woman among the bound five.

  Bazz stood up as the man raised his gun, holding his own hostage writhing in front of him. The enfeebled gunman howled and shrieked and pulled at Bazz’s jaws, without a hope in hell of freeing himself. It was as if he knew it wouldn’t matter soon enough anyway, and of course he was right.

  Bang! Bang-bang-bang!

  They shot at Bazz and their captive comrade both. The bullets tore through their friend, who spasmed and twitched in front of Bazz, his blood flicking on Bazz’s fur. A few bullets hit Bazz too, absorbed into his thick hide, soon to be harmlessly expelled. Bazz dropped the dead man and stepped over him to make quick work of the other two men. One kept shooting, the other turned and ran down the road.

  But even the last standing gunman seemed to know the gun was useless. For some reason, he seemed to think a hunting knife would be more effective, pulling it out of a leather sheath and raising it high to bring it down into the back of Bazz’s neck. But a single swipe of his massive right arm, paw cutting up into his arm from below, pulled the man’s forearm from his elbow, splitting and tearing off with a hideous pop and tear followed by the man’s screams.

  Bazz stood on all fours for just a moment, enjoying the man’s utter shock and helplessness, his amazed scream and the realization in his wide eyes that he was looking into the face of his own death. He was already dead, and he seemed to know it.

  And there was another man to kill.