BearyMerryChristmas by Tianna Xander Page A

stood up and flapped its wings, Lara noticed that it had a small tag on its leg. It either belonged to someone or was part of some sort of study and the tag was a transmitter that tracked its movements.
    “Did you get out of your cage and now you’re lost?” Lara felt like an idiot talking to the two birds, especially when her voice was the only sound other than the whisper of the breeze and the soft flutter of feathers.
    The bird that flapped its wings chattered at her for a bit. Kurr, kurr, kurr… It hopped to another tree, turned and chattered at her again. Kurr, kurr, kurr… It was almost as though it wanted her to follow it. Shaking her head, Lara continued down the road. She was not following a couple of birds deep into the woods on the off chance that they had an owner and a warm home there. She wasn’t that desperate…yet.
    Lara walked for what felt like forever. She checked her watch and sighed. Another hour had passed and she was freezing, literally. She was tired, too. Every step grew more and more difficult to take. Her body had become sluggish and she wanted to do nothing more than lie down and sleep, even if it was on the cold, hard ground. What was left of her nearly frozen brain told her that her body temperature had dropped and she was dangerously close to collapsing from hypothermia.
    A noise had her glancing to her right, once again. The two birds had returned. Huddled together on the branch, they stared at her. If birds could have expressions, Lara would have said they looked at her as though she was nothing more than a waste of skin.
    “Stop looking at me like that!” Lara closed her eyes and sighed. Now, she wasn’t just talking to birds, she was downright yelling at them.
    The turtledoves chattered at her gain. This time, both of them acted as though they wanted her to follow them. Sighing, Lara looked up and down the lonely road and saw nothing. Only then did she take her first step off the road. At this point, she had nothing left to lose. With the lowering temperature and hypothermia setting in, Lara knew she was as good as dead already.
    * * * *
    “I dinnae know why ye insist on running naked through the woods every December. It’s downright barmy.”
    Jamie was always complaining, damn him. Duncan continued to run through the moonlit forest. He would never admit it out loud, but he loved the beauty of the snow-covered trees. It was one of the reasons he insisted on this run every year.
    “Shut it!” Duncan snarled. He was so damned tired of listening to people complain, he could happily and remorselessly kill the next idiot to bitch to him about anything. “I’m bloody tired of hearing people friggin’ whining about everything under the damned sun.”
    Jamie gave him a startled look. “I wasnae really bitching at ye, now was I, Duncan? I was just giving ye a hard time.”
    “Fuck your friggin’ hard time.” Duncan continued to glare at his best friend. If he couldn’t vent to Jamie, whom could he unload on? “I’m friggin’ sick and bloody tired of everyone giving me shit every time I turn around.” He was, too, damn it. Too many people took it upon themselves to give him shit. “We need tae leave this damned mountain and find ourselves mates.”
    Hell, even the females were getting testy lately. Mates among their kind were few and far between. Duncan and Jamie were old enough to remember the old ways. The way children ran through the town playing and being a general nuisance. He and Jamie had been a few of the last. Their clan hadn’t seen a new child in over three hundred years. It had been closer to four, truth be known.
    Nearly a thousand years ago, not long after man became dominant on the food chain, they began to hunt his kind to extinction. Humans hunted them so thoroughly, in fact, that his people had been forced to take their human forms almost permanently to protect themselves. Only a handful of them even shifted anymore since they were afraid of someone