Bear raised his head. Seal blood stained his muzzle a brilliant red. It looked like a child had smeared lipstick on him. “You cannot,” he said.
She scowled at the red stains. “Can’t you eat without dripping?”
“I have a large head.”
“You’re a slob.”
“All polar bears eat this way.”
“You’re making me lose my appetite.” Grabbing her linen napkin, she marched to Bear.
“I am sorry,” he said contritely. She wiped the gore from his chin and then went back to her seat.
With her watching, he snipped the blubber delicately with his incisors. He let the blood drip onto the floor before gulping the fat whole. “Better,” Cassie said. “You know if I had work to do, I wouldn’t obsess over your table manners. Plenty of research topics out there. You could tell me how polar bears navigate so effectively on the changing ice, or I could have the final word on whether polar bears are evolving into sea mammals.” She could be a station staffer on sabbatical, sort of. She’d already planned to do her college degree remotely. This would simply be more remote than anyone knew.
Gently, Bear said, “You cannot be a human scientist here. No one would believe you. What would you tell them? Your source is a talking bear? You live in an ice castle and feel no cold?”
Cassie swirled the sauce. She watched seal blood pool on the ice and thought about her future. Her path had always seemed so certain before. But she’d given it up by staying here, and she hadn’t even noticed. No wonder she felt so restless. She’d abandoned her future and replaced it with what? Gourmet dinners and pretty sculptures? She had no purpose here.
The table absorbed the blood, and the red vanished as if down a drain. She looked at her chicken. “Have you ever seen a polar bear in a cage?” she asked. “It paces. Back and forth. All day long: back and forth. It wears a rut in the floor. It doesn’t stop to eat. It doesn’t stop to sleep. It simply paces until it wastes away and dies.”
“You are unhappy?”
Unable to answer that, she looked up at him. “I want to go home,” she said.
It didn’t take her long to prepare to leave. Bear watched her from the bedroom door as she packed her belongings. All was silent around them. There was no wind, no creak of ice, no nothing. It felt as if the castle were holding its breath.
“Do you plan to return?” Bear asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t look at him.
“How can you not know?”
“I just don’t.” All she knew was the idea of staying made her miserable and the idea of leaving made her just as miserable.
“So I must wait like a good little puppy dog while you decide our future?”
Cassie couldn’t answer that. Instead, she focused on pulling on her Gore-Tex and flannels over her clothes. She was heading back out into a world where she’d need all her layers. She had a memory of herself, age eight, being dressed by her father in so much fleece and down that she couldn’t lower her arms. When she got back to the station, she’d see her father again. She tried to imagine that conversation. How was she going to explain why she hadn’t returned sooner?
Bear growled, low in his throat, making the hair on the back of her neck prickle. “I have been a fool,” he said. “I believed you cared about me.”
Cassie frowned at him as she zipped her parka. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s me.” He was… sweet. And fun. But this wasn’t about him. It was about her—who she wanted to be, what she wanted her future life to be.
“Of course it ‘has to do’ with me,” he said. “It is my life you speak of.”
“And my life,” she snapped back. “You want me to sacrifice my career, friends, family, a mother I have never even met.” Granted, after the first few weeks had passed, she hadn’t missed her mother at all. Ruthlessly, she pushed that thought aside. “I can’t do that.” She’d worked so hard—late nights studying for Dad’s pop quizzes, long treks chasing bears, weekends cleaning equipment, all so she could someday earn an official staff position, a future she’d just tossed away to do what? Be Bear’s companion? Play in the topiary garden? Dance in the ballroom? It wasn’t enough.
“You do not belong there anymore,” he said. “It is your past. You cannot go back. This is your home now.”
Cassie shook her head. This wasn’t her home; this was Bear’s castle. Her eyes swept over the ice rose bed and the seabird wardrobe and the shimmering walls and golden door. She did know every curl of ice now, every rainbow reflection. She loved the shimmering sheen of the ice, the soothing wind outside, and all the memories she now had of everything here. But it’s not home, she told herself firmly. She had to remember that. Home was the station.
“You belong with me,” he said. “We are one.”
“No, we’re not. You’re out being munaqsri, and I’m…” She felt like… like a pet, kept at home until he was free to play with her.
“Should I let the polar bears be stillborn? Is that what you want me to do? Let their souls drift beyond the ends of the earth? I have responsibilities. You know that I do.”
“I know!” This was hard enough, and he was making it worse. It reminded her of how she’d come here—by being blackmailed with a bargain she hadn’t been able to refuse. But that wasn’t fair. The bargain to save her mother had been her own idea. And after that, Cassie had chosen to stay. At least, she’d thought she’d had a choice. She’d believed him when he’d said she wasn’t a prisoner. What if… He wouldn’t force her to stay. He wasn’t like that. “If you really cared about me, you’d let me go.”
He turned away from her. “Go,” he said. She exhaled a breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. He added, “I will stay here and pace like a bear in a zoo until you return to me.”
Cassie sat down hard on the bed as the anger and frustration drained out of her. “I didn’t mean…” Didn’t mean what? To leave? But she did mean to leave. From the beginning, she had meant to leave. She just hadn’t meant to hurt him. And she hadn’t meant to care if she hurt him.
Bear sighed. “If you wish it, I will take you home.”
CHAPTER 10
Latitude 70° 49’ 23” N
Longitude 152° 29’ 25” W
Altitude 10 ft.
Cassie hadn’t remembered the station being so ugly. She’d always thought it resembled a sideways soup can, but she’d never noticed what an old soup can it had become. Its metal walls were pockmarked with the red-brown stains of decades of rust. The shed walls were worse. The whole complex was incongruous with the pristine ice desert. After all the years she’d walked in and out of that dented, rusted door without ever looking at it, seeing it now felt… strange.
She dismounted from Bear, but her hand stayed on his neck. He turned his head to look at her with his soulful eyes. “It looks different, that’s all,” she said, in answer to his unspoken question.
“You are different,” he said. “This place is not your home anymore.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” she said, taking her hand off his neck. “This is hard enough as it is.”
“I do not want leaving me to be easy.”
“Well, it’s not, so stop it.” He subsided, and she went back to staring across the station compound. Skidmarks from a Twin Otter crossed in front of the shed and headed behind the station. Max was here. Max. Owen. Liam. Scott. Jeremy. Dad and… and Mom. Cold pierced her cheeks even under her face mask now that she wasn’t touching Bear. Cassie closed the gusset on her hood.