Who We Are (The Seafare Chronicles 2)

“Nice eyepatch, Kid,” I snap at him. “It’s certainly an improvement.”

The Kid reaches up and rubs the patch covering the right socket where his eye used to be, a remnant from our last fight. I’d ripped the eye from its socket while in my bear form, and his screams had been long and loud.

“You’ll pay for your transgressions, Bear,” the Kid shouts, “and pay dearly you shall! You have nowhere to run. My men have this place surrounded!

You are now my prisoners, and you’ll come back with me to the underground PETA lair, where I’ll perform dastardly experimentations and will finally glean the secrets of the Were-Bear and Were-Otter! The world will forever remember what PETA and I have done this night! The world will be mine!”

“I’ll never let you have him!” Otter hisses. “Bear is mine!”

The Kid cackles again. “Oh yes, I’d forgotten you were mates. Such a trivial thing, love is. It can bring even the greatest man to his knees.” He looks darkly amused as he glances between us. “Have you told him yet, Otter? Have you told Bear your final secret?”

“Kid,” Otter warns, “you leave that out of this!”

“Bear, you should know this before you are separated from your mate, never to see each other again.”

“Kid!” Otter shouts. “Don’t do this!”

“When a Were-Bear and Were-Otter are destined to be mates, such as is written in the Prophecy of Otter-Se-Ra, the otter is biologically endowed with the capability… to become pregnant.”

Lightning flashes overhead.

“You’re pregnant?” I whisper to Otter.

He nods sadly. “With a litter of Otter-Bears.” He presses my hand against his distended stomach. “There are sixteen of them,” he sighs. “And you’re the father.”

“I just thought you were getting fat,” I say, feeling a kick against my palm, the little life inside my mate.

“Fat with my love for you,” he whispers as he gazes into my eyes.

“I can’t let any harm come to you and my babies,” I tell him. And with that, I pull him off the edge of the building.

As we fall through the night air, the rain slashing against our faces, the Kid screaming from somewhere up above, I shift into the Great Grizzly that is my Were-Bear form. My arms and legs explode in muscle and hair, the claws stretching into wicked three-inch black hooks. My face elongates and my snout picks up a billion different scents in the air. But then my royal heritage reveals itself as wings unfurl from my sides, catching the wind and lifting us up.

“You can fly?” Otter shouts over the rushing cacophony around us.

Yes, I think at him. And I can breathe fire. I open my jaws, and a great flaming gout shoots out of my mouth, causing the rain around us to hiss as it evaporates.

“I can’t wait to have our babies,” he says to me, stroking my ears.

Me either, I think at him. Otter, I lo—

“THIS is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” the Kid says, scowling at me and interrupting my epic story. He sits up in his bed, the covers falling down at his sides. “Bears don’t have wings!”

“Fat with my love for you?” Otter says incredulously from his spot next to me on the Kid’s bed. “You made me pregnant and said I was fat with my love for you?”

“What the hell are you guys talking about?” I ask, feeling insulted.

“That was getting really good!”

“If by good you mean not good, then, yes, it was getting very good,” the Kid retorts.

“You made me a pregnant shifting otter!” Otter yelps.

“Whatever,” I say as I roll my eyes. “Mrs. Paquinn told me that shifter stories are more popular than any other subgenre and that I should try to cash in on them.”

“I think if you’re going all the way down to sub genres to start with, then you have a problem already,” the Kid says. “Besides, aren’t those stories all pretty much the same? Be careful, Bear. You wouldn’t want anyone accusing you of copying someone else. Trust me: there’s a few people on the Internet who have way too much time on their hands.”

He’s got a point there.