I don’t need people. My bear doesn’t need a sleuth. Four months every summer, I live in a fire lookout tower — just me, the radio, and miles of territory to patrol. I shift under the stars. I run until my muscles ache. I am content alone in a way most shifters never understand.
Then a scent drifts up to my tower from the cabin a mile below, and my grizzly stops breathing.
She’s a shifter. I know that much. But she’s not Ridgewood. Not Crescent. Not Aspen Hollow. She’s something other. Something colder. Something rarer than I’ve ever scented in my life.
Gabi Laurent is the last polar bear shifter in the lower forty-eight. The last of a bloodline. A woman who’s spent her whole adult life solitary because there’s no one of her kind to find — and who came to my mountain to write the only record her people will ever have.
My bear doesn’t care about bloodlines.
He starts leaving her things on her porch. Firewood she didn’t ask for. A deer he killed. Carved bone from his workshop. Small, quiet courtship offerings from a grizzly to a polar bear who’s never been courted by anything in her life.
The first time she shifts, eight hundred pounds of cream-white bear stepping into the moonlight outside her cabin, I forget how to breathe.
She thinks being the last of her kind means choosing extinction.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life teaching her it means choosing what survives.
