Bearing the Midnight Sun (Ice Bear Shifters Book 3) by Sloane Meyers

along?” he called out over his shoulder.
    “Getting close to done with yours,” Alan hollered back. “Neal’s and Eric’s are already finished. So all we’ll have left to do after yours is my cabin and the addition to Ryker’s cabin. Pretty good progress if you ask me.”
    Tyler walked back into the front room, clinking his beer bottle with Neal’s and Alan’s in a quick salute as he passed them. He leaned against the front counter and faced Neal and Alan, taking a long sip of his beer before speaking. “Well, I hope we get the cabins finished up soon, because we have a problem.”
    Neal and Alan both turned to look at Tyler, narrowing their eyes and waiting for him to continue. Announcing there was a problem usually meant either that a human was suspicious that one of their clan members might be a shifter, or that a rival clan—such as the Blizzards—was causing trouble. Neither one of these scenarios could be taken lightly.
    “My friend Kat saw a Blizzard.”
    Neal set his beer down and furrowed his brow. “How do you know this?”
    “She’s been going on a bunch of tours over the last few weeks, and she mentioned to me that she saw a polar bear on one of them. Of course, the tour guide was excited about it and pointed out how rare polar bear sightings are. I asked Kat if she remembered what color the eyes were, and she thinks they were black.”
    Silence hung heavy in the room for several long moments. The Blizzards were the only polar bear shifter clan around with jet black eyes. Real polar bears usually had brown eyes. The shifter clans all had various colors of eyes. A few clans had blue eyes. Many clans had green eyes. But only the Northern Lights bears had violet eyes. And only the Blizzards had black eyes.
    “Damn it, why are they still here in the middle of the summer?” Neal said, pounding his fist on the supply table next to him and causing the beer he had placed there to jump at the force.
    “I don’t know,” Tyler said. “But at least some of them didn’t head north for the summer this year. I’m not convinced that the whole clan is down here, but I have a feeling they’ve left scouts to try to spy on us and see what we’re doing. My guess is that they’re planning to launch a big attack once the whole clan returns for the winter. But, in any case, we need to make sure we’re staying alert. I doubt they’ll attack during the summer. They’re already weaker than us, and their sensitivity to warmer weather makes them even weaker. But you never know. Better to be on guard and stay vigilant.
    Neal nodded. “I think your assessment is correct, Tyler. I don’t think they’ll attack. But we all need to be watchful. I’ll alert Ryker and Eric. And both of you keep an eye out. And an ear out. Let me know if you see or hear anything more that would indicate the Blizzards are around.”
    Tyler nodded, then chugged the rest of his beer. He tossed the bottle in the trash and headed for the front door. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything else. I gotta go get some rest now. I’ve got a run scheduled in the morning that I definitely don’t want to miss.”
    Tyler headed home, already giddy with excitement at the thought of seeing Kat the next day.

Chapter Seven
    Kat’s lungs were on fire. Literally on fire.
    “Need… to… stop,” she choked out. The energy it took to say those three words felt overwhelming. Tyler, of course, wasn’t impressed with the fact that she was dying from lack of oxygen.
    “Almost there,” he chirped out cheerily as he glanced at his sports watch. “Three more minutes of running and you can take a walking break.”
    Kat wanted to groan, but she didn’t have the energy for even that. She would have quit a long time ago if she had been running by herself. But Tyler was a brutal taskmaster, forcing her to stick to the time goal she had set for herself when they took off this morning. As she closed in on the last fifteen seconds of her run, she swore to