Bearing The Long Road Home (Ice Bear Shifters 7) Read Online Free PDF

Yellowknife in the morning. She kept to herself, and hoped that none of the incoming trucks arriving after her were driven by the shifter. Everything was going so well on this job thus far. She didn’t want anything to mess up her chance at freedom.
    Early the next morning, once again hours before the sun came up, Chloe got back out on the ice for the drive back to Yellowknife. Things went smoothly for about five hours, and at 10 a.m. Chloe watched the sun rising over the horizon, finally kicking off the few hours of daylight she would see today. She relished the beauty of the pink and orange sunrise reflecting across the crisp snow and ice, and told herself that the scenery did have its moments, even out here.
    She smiled as she crested over the top of a hill in the ice road. Climbing the hills was so much easier when the trailer was empty and thousands of pounds lighter. Chloe’s smile didn’t last long, though. As she came over the top of the hill, she saw a moose ambling slowly across the ice road at the bottom of the hill. Chloe generally wasn’t a potty mouth, but the string of curses that came out of her mouth when she saw the moose would have made a sailor blush.
    Even at the slow speed of twenty miles per hour, stopping a semi truck takes some time. Chloe screamed at the moose and honked her truck’s horn, trying to scare him out of her way. But the moose just looked up at her with dazed eyes and continued slowly walking on the road. Chloe’s truck slowed, but couldn’t stop in time, and it struck the massive animal hard on the left side of her front grill. The truck lurched forward and to the side as an awful boom rang across the ice from the impact. The truck’s lurch continued, and it skidded sideways off the ice road and onto the snow. The cab of the truck flipped completely sideways onto the drivers’ side as the semi finally came to rest on the deep snow bank. Chloe’s head smashed against the side of the window, and the last thing she remembered before going unconscious was thinking that the seatbelt cutting into her skin hurt worse than the slicing of a bear claw.

Chapter Six
     
    Seth yawned as he approached another ice hill. For the last hour, he hadn’t been able to stop yawning. He wasn’t tired, exactly. Just bored out of his mind. But for the amount of money he was getting paid to sit in the cab of this semi-truck, he wasn’t going to complain about being bored. The only thing he really hated about this job so far was all these damn hills. This was his first trip out on the ice, and he could already tell that he and the hills were not going to be friends. The trip back was a little easier, with no weight on his trailer pulling him backwards every time he tried to climb a hill. Still, getting traction on a hill of ice was no joke.
    Seth breathed a sigh of relief as he came over the top of the hill. Another hill down, dozens more to go. He was a little less than halfway back to Yellowknife, so he had hours more of this fun ahead of him. Seth’s sigh of relief soon changed to a gasp of horror as he saw a truck on its side next to the road at the bottom of the hill. He braked as quickly as he dared, stopping several hundred feet in front of the overturned truck. He pulled on his thickest gloves, grabbed a crowbar, and jumped from his truck, immediately being hit in the face by a frigid blast of air. He ignored the stinging cold and ran toward the truck, which was sending up plumes of smoke from the engine. As he approached the wreck, he saw the source of the problem. A large moose lay in a crumpled pile in front of the semi. Seth slowed his run a bit as he approached the moose, until he was sure that the animal was completely dead. The last thing he wanted to do right now was upset a wounded animal that weighed over a ton.
    “Hello?” Seth called out, as he tried to see past the smoke and into the front cabin. “Can you hear me in there? Are you okay?”
    There was no answer, and the front