Police Bear (Paranormal Shifter Romance Short Story)

By Selina Coffey

Paranormal investigator Charlie Jones is intrigued when she receives an email about a very strange case. Charlie's interest is quickly piqued as she receives a second email with further sightings of the bear. Transpiring to not just be any bear, but a mythical creature, Charlie's interest is captured ever further. Determined to discover the truth, Charlie and her trusted employee Samantha travel to Ursathorpe, expecting to expose a fraud. What they find is mysterious recluse Constable Nicholas Bernard, easy on the eyes but plagued by tragic secrets. Charlie and Samantha frantically dig for the truth. The mystery deepens as they discover an antique diary that exposes the town's ancient secrets. Is this book exposing the truth, or a collection of fairy tales? Charlie soon learns Nicholas's secret. A beautiful night together is dramatically followed by Charlie's kidnapping. Can Nicholas save her without exposing his own secrets to the world? Will a betrayal end in tragedy? Charlie and Nicholas must fight for that chance, each in their own way, to win.

 

Author's Note: This is a 10,000 word short story. Story contains mature language and themes, intended for adults only.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lovy Books Ltd
• Release date: Aug 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223571322

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Charlie stared at the computer screen, the light glaring almost painfully at her blue eyes in the darkness. The picture on the screen did resemble a bear, but there were no bears in England. Well, there were some in zoos perhaps, but none in the wild. Perplexed, Charlie increased the size of the picture but it just increased the pixels too much, making the picture just a blurred mess of tiny squares. Interesting, she thought, as she went back to the email she’d received ten minutes ago.

As the creator of a website, trueornot.org, Charlie Jones and her team investigated reports of the paranormal, Big Foot sightings, and other strange and unexplained occurrences. Most of the time they found people playing silly buggers, or families that could hear the pipes knocking around at night as the temperatures cooled, but she hadn’t investigated a strange animal sighting in a while. Charlie was skeptical about it all but approached each assignment with an open mind. She was confident that science and reason could disprove every case she took on. So far she’d been correct. Maybe one day something would come along to prove her wrong but it hadn’t happened yet.

This reported sighting came in from a place near Whitby called Ursathorpe. She laughed ruefully to herself, a report of a bear in Ursathorpe. The place was so tiny it only showed as a blip on her mapping program, the circle bigger than the village itself. Settling back onto the pillows piled behind her in the bed and pushing her straight red hair out of her face, Charlie thought about what she’d just read and seen.

There wasn’t much in the message, just a sentence that said Bet you haven’t seen one of these in England before.

No she hadn’t seen a bear in England before, much less a bear in a place called bear-town. Not likely. Sitting back up she hovered her finger on the mousepad of her laptop, preparing to send the email to her hoax file, her version of a spam folder. She didn’t want to necessarily delete it, but she did want it out of her inbox. Before she could click the button to send the file somewhere else, she received a notification that she had another email. This one was from the same person.

Oh, this one’s desperate for it, she said to herself. Living alone, there was nobody else around to hear her.

Curious as to what sort of evidence would be produced next, she clicked open the email and opened the attached file. When the attachment finally opened she was surprised to see it was a video file. Clicking the play button she sat back to watch. At first, all she could see was a black screen. Then the camera panned out and she could see a road sign that said Ursathorpe on it. The video then moved along, as if the person were in a car, and drove into a field.

The people got out of the car and walked out into the field. Bantering between the two of them revealed male voices but that was all, the video never showed the males. As they walked along, they stopped behind some trees and settled down. A few minutes passed and Charlie was going to turn the video off but she started to hear a strange noise from the video, a strange snuffling sound. Then a roar followed.

Oh this is going to be good, she thought to herself, expecting a face to pop out of the darkness and scare her. It