Read Black Bear Fall: A BWWM Paranormal Romance (Black Bear Saga Book 2) for Free Online

get the scent out of his mind, it had pulled him from his slumber, breaking through the thick veil of hibernation and yanking him awake before he was ready. It was a high spice smell of cinnamon mixed with a hint of pepper, the kind of aroma that tickled your nose when you breathed it in, you couldn't help yourself from going back for another sniff. Images of his childhood flowed by the scent transporting him to a time when his family lived the life of the wanderer. In those days they never seemed to stay in a place for too long, his father with his brusque ways would sometimes facilitate them having to leave under a sky pinpricked with stars. Other times when his eyes burned with tears because he didn't want to leave again his mother would shower kisses on him and tell him that they had to go because of the settled folk. Sometimes the settled people seemed to grow weary of his family in some undefined way and again they would set out, usually at night and move to a new place. The cycle continued all through his life and when it came his turn to build a family he found himself falling back into the old habits that had been scored deep into his being from a young age. Keep moving and trust no one who wasn’t family.
    When the man was eight years old his father got into a fight in a bar close to the dock in the town of Hull, England. The man remembered waking up in their one bedroom shack when his father burst into the place and slammed the thin door of reclaimed wood shut behind him. This was two years after his sister had died and the boy had become a sensitive tuning fork to both his parents moods. For those two years they had moved the most and seemed to stay in any one place for no more than a few weeks, while the boys father took any odd jobs available. During this time his father seemed like a lump of hardened clay animated badly to impersonate his father. The boy would become scared when his father had drank too much and he would look at his son with a dark malevolence in his eyes. Maybe I should of been the one to die the boy sometimes wondered as he listened to his father snore from the other end of the bed.
    His mother had tried to get his father to sit down when he burst in. He was holding one of his hands balled up in the other and in the only candle light in the shack the boy could see fat drops of blood splashing onto the legs of his fathers rough spun trousers. His mother grabbed a cloth from the shelf where they stored a tin of lard and a tin of flour. “Your bleeding,” his mother said wrapping the cloth around his knuckles.
    “The father rubbed the cloth across his knuckles and said ,”Its not mine. I think I broke them.” He looked over at the boy lying on the bed with his eyes half closed and said, “I know your awake, stop pretending boy.”
    The boy sat up and looked smaller than usual with the thin cotton sheet draped over his shoulders. “Do we have to move again,” he said in his thin reedy voice.
    The father looked at the boy and then the Mother and said in a hushed tone, “They will be coming after us. I think I did some real damage to a couple of fella’s back in that dive of a bar. They came at me first, I promise you that, he said reaching out for the Mothers hand.
    She hesitated and then let him envelope her small hands in his massive one. “We better get moving,” she said and the boy recognised the cold hard look in her eyes. She was the real centre of the family and even at a young age the boy knew it. The mother and father began to stuff their few tawdry belongings into an old leather bag they had found in a dump.
    Something in the under growth moved up ahead and the man stopped in his tracks, his past memories pushed away as he refocused on the environment around him. He sniffed the air and he could smell the hot blood beating of a small animal nearby, a rabbit or a house cat maybe. He looked in the direction of the sound and then turned away from it, he couldn't get distracted