Page 44 of Bear My Heart

"He's been old as long as anybody can remember," Pete said fondly. "But okay, maybe not his grandparents. Great-grandparents, maybe, but however far back it was, they drew pictures of what they remembered from when they were children. The gates are based on those drawings, and so is the town's totem pole."

To his surprise, Shanti pressed her fingers alongside her nose, eyes bright with emotion. "That's great. So much has been lost. I'm glad they were able to rebuild, if not preserve, some of it." She went quiet again as they drove through town, and for the second time, Pete found himself trying to see it through her eyes.

The oldest part of the town was demarcated by two recently-ish-built cedar longhouses represented the housing the Tlingit people had once used regularly in this area. A Russian Orthodox church's onion-shaped top glinted blue and gold, even in the soft winter light, and there were old log cabins that were still in gentle use, often as B&Bs these days, though some of them still housed the descendants of the Russian settlers who had built the church. Trees clustered around the Old Town, mostly spruce and fir, though there were black-branched willows and birchs, too.

Outside that core lay the handful of main streets, many of which housed businesses in buildings dating from the 1950s, though there was a slow movement toward new builds simply because the old ones were falling apart from age and wear, no matter how much care had been taken with them. No one building them back then had really expected them to still be in use most of a century later.

Beyond the main street, homes and businesses mostly had big lots and considerable privacy from each other, though there were subdivisions set back into the woods, too. The mountains swept upward behind the town, and the deep-water port shone with glimpses of dark silver through the trees and buildings. After a couple of nervous minutes, Peter mumbled, "It's prettier in the sunshine," and Shanti laughed.

"Almost everywhere is. It's almost a frontier town, isn't it? Like it kind of looks like…it's not Western at all, but it's not all compact and thought out and planned the way Virtue was. It looks sort of…raw."

That wasn't a bad way to put it. Pete nodded. "It's beyond the end of the road, so 'frontier' is probably about right. The new clinic is down that way," he said with another nod, just before turning onto the next road, which led toward his own house.

"Oh! I'll want to see that," Shanti said decisively. "Not necessarily today. I'm not entirely sure I can walk in a straight line right now, I'm so tired. It's a long flight. I might need a nap when we get…here?"

The last question came as he pulled into his driveway and up to a little three-bedroom house that backed up to the mountain, as many houses in Shkalnik did. It looked very, very quiet right now, and Pete hoped his brother had stopped by to turn the heat up as promised. Up, not on: leaving the heat off in an Alaskan house in the wintertime meant frozen pipes and a mess to clean up, most of the time. "Here," he agreed. "Home sweet home."

"You can just go right out the back door and have a nice walk on the mountain as a bear, can't you?" Shanti asked, smiling, and Peter ducked his head.

"That might have been part of the appeal, yeah. Although there's not many places in Shkalnik you can't wander around as a bear or a moose or…well, more or less anything that's a local animal. There aren't usually grizzlies in town, but people would just get out of the way if I wanted to have a walk."

Shanti's eyes went completely round and her voice rose. "Really? Because everybody knows about shifters, or…?"

"Because wild animals wander through here all the time."

Shanti's voice went up again. "Really? We get deer in Virtue, but…bears? Moose? How do I know if they're shifters or regular animals?"

Peter grinned as he got out of the truck and went around to open her door before getting their luggage. "You don't, so you should assume they're true animals and stay away from them."

"Good grief. Okay. I guess that would be safest, yes. Bears?" She followed him to the door as he unlocked it, and waited for him to go in and turn on a light.

"Mostly black bears," he offered as the light came on. "And not often. Bears are generally really shy, and people around here know better than to leave their trash out so a bear can get into it. Especially with the dump available, although we're trying to get that turned into waste recycling facility. Which is not easy up here. Anywhere in Alaska, never mind in a town the size of this one." He felt like he was rambling, and took a breath to stop himself before gesturing toward the house. "So this is it."

It was a nice little house, if an old one that he'd never had updated to an open-plan interior. It had a split level entry with a daylight basement, so one set of stairs went down that way, and the other went up to the main floor, where a living room was off to the left and straight ahead lay a kitchen-dining-room area separated by a counter. There were bedrooms and a bathroom down a short hallway to the left, and Shanti thought they must sit over the ground-level garage. Peter brought the luggage upstairs, giving Shanti the ten-cent tour along the way, and paused outside the bedroom doors. "I don't know if you want a room of your own…?"

Her mouth quirked in a smile. "Is yours set up for two people to share it?"

"I've got a big bed, but…all my stuff is everywhere," Pete admitted, and Shanti's smile broadened.

"I'll put my things in the other bedroom, then, but I might decide not to sleep there."

"I'd love it if you decided not to sleep there, and I won't even turn the heat way down to convince you."

Our mate can sleep in our den, his bear said hopefully. We'll keep her nice and warm.

If she wants, yeah, Peter agreed.

Shanti laughed. "You wouldn't."

"Not on purpose, but I do run warm, so if you're cold, let me know and I'll turn it up, okay?"

"Okay. For the moment it's fine, and—" Whatever Shanti was going to say was lost in an eye-watering yawn. "Oh my God. I think I need a nap. Do we have any important plans for the afternoon?"

"I thought I'd spare you meeting the family until we'd had some sleep," Pete confessed, and a look of relief swept Shanti's face.

"Oh, good. Not that I don't want to meet them, but I don't think I'm at my best right now."

"I don't think you've got a worst to be at."