by Red, Lynn
“Someone named Eckert,” Rogue said. “He had a scarf or something wrapped around his throat. He kept asking strange questions and going on and on about things that made no sense. And,” he looked between the bears. “I’m guessing from the looks on your faces, you know who he is?”
“Was!” Stone growled, standing up and sweeping one of his feet backwards through the leaves. “Fury murdered him. He was our captor, he was the one who experimented on us so brutally, he’s the one who did such... horrible things... to the rest of the clan.”
There was a roughly softball-sized lump in Claire’s throat when he confirmed the awful truth. “But,” she stood up, too, “how’s that possible?”
“There were... whistles. Mechanical whistling noises, they came from his neck, you said?” Fury asked. Rage flashed in his eyes. “If I have to kill him a thousand times for him to stay dead, I’ll do it. And I’ll love every second of his suffering.”
“There’s something else, though,” Rogue said. “That soldier. I don’t know what to call him really. The black-clad gas mask wearing things. The one that took me to him seemed different from the rest. He was joking with me, or teasing me or something. Seemed like he had a mind, and the rest were just ants.”
A quiet fell over the camp. Not even Draven, who’d been busily stirring a pot of collected tubers, mushrooms and small animals, made a sound. He just listened, as though he was as intent on the conversation as everyone else.
And then, of course, they’d just been freed. Just let out the front door with no questions and no repercussions. Just let free to walk out the big, metal doors that separated that curious laboratory from the rest of the world. And then, once again, he remembered nothing until he saw Jill.
Rogue’s voice was faltering, but he was still talking. He still had something to say. “I... he just let us go. He told me – and I fully believe – that if he wanted us dead, or the rest of the clan exterminated, it would have happened. He just... he kind of smiled, in that slack-jawed way, as he let us go.”
“Why does it have to be like this?” Claire pushed to her feet again, evading both Jill’s grasp and Draven’s. “Why can’t we just get on with living? We all have what we want, right? What we need? We’ve all got mates, and Draven has that pot of stew and he’s got his mysteries solved. Isn’t that good enough?”
“Nowhere near.” The old bear narrowed his gaze. “I need answers. I need to know what happened to my mate, to my cubs. I need to know everything.”
“Everything isn’t worth knowing!” Claire was beside herself. She couldn’t stand that she was watching, right before her eyes, a rift opening up between all of them. And it was happening right then. No matter how much she wished, there wasn’t a damn thing in the world she could do about it. “You all have a place in Santa Barbara, right? Jill told me about it. Why can’t we just forget about all of this and go on with our lives?”
“Because,” Stone said with a snarl, “you might be fated to us, and we to you. But there are thousands of years of a clan that are now being held in that goddamn lab. They have to be freed. My people—“
“Our people,” King cut him off. “His and mine. We are the alphas.”
“We, too, have the marks,” Stone said. His eyes flashed rage, as did King’s. “We’re every bit as entitled to the clan as are you. We’ve suffered more than you could possibly imagine.”
Before King had a chance to respond, Rogue took a step back. “That was... not the right thing to say,” he said under his breath. “Best to just...”
Stone narrowed his eyes. Fury was apparently of the same mind as was Rogue and took his sworn brother by the shoulder at the same time that Rogue grabbed King. “We mustn’t fight,” he urged. “We have to figure out some way to—“
“The way is to kill this bastard,” Stone snarled. “Kill both of them and retake the clan.”
Claire tried to step in the way, as did Jill. Draven grabbed both of them though, his grip so firm that it hurt either shoulder just a bit. “They won’t kill each other. They can’t,” he hissed. “But if you two get in the way things might get really out of hand. This is... well it’s completely stupid, and makes no sense at all, but this kind of alpha posturing is pretty normal, if I’m going to be totally honest.”
Before anyone could react, both men had half-shifted, their chests turned to furry barrels, their arms and legs to tree trunks. Stone was slate gray, striking and severe. King was golden, just like his one glittering eye. It wasn’t lost on anyone watching that past coloring, the two looked very, very similar to one another.
Teeth gnashed, claws flew, and blood came next. Stone and King met in the middle, jaws apart, faces an inch away from one another. There wasn’t a whole lot anyone was going to do, but they’d been doing a whole lot of what Draven had called alpha posturing, and hadn’t cut any skin, at least not seriously. Lots of punching, lots of head squeezing and really nasty looking neck wrenching, but neither of them had decided to take a chunk out of the other.
“So this is normal?” Claire asked the old man, or whoever was listening. “I’m used to guys acting like they’re going to fight over stuff but this is a little over the top.”
The two dueling alphas clasped hands in the middle. Their arms created a triangular, steeple-like configuration, similar to professional wrestlers circling one another to begin a match. King snarled, Stone growled, and then they slammed their chests together. They were of a very similar height, and similar build to go with their almost identical coloration.
“Are they related?” Claire asked. “They look so similar that—“
“Wouldn’t be possible,” Rogue said, as he and Fury joined the audience. All they needed was popcorn and a few beers, and they’d have the best seat in the house at a prize fight that was going nowhere. “Those two – your two – they were taken long ago. We were only teenagers when the clan was split.”
Everyone winced at a bone-crunching blow from Stone to King that was met almost immediately afterward with a counterpunch that would have severed any normal man’s liver, or kidneys, or spine, or anything else for that matter. Stone let out a wild howl and got a thick, muscled arm around his counterpart’s neck.
“You were only teenagers,” Draven said, “and so were they. I have a theory.”
His scientific musing was interrupted by a clothesline from King that was immediately followed with an absolutely brutal kick to the ribs of the fallen bear. But still – no real injuries.
“It’s an art, really,” Draven said, as though he were commenting on a boxing match. “They know exactly what to do that will hurt the other one, but they’re not willing to kill. I’ve counted six opportunities for King to kill Stone by this point, and four going the other way. All it would take is a snap of the neck or a particularly hard bite, to say nothing of a jugular—“
“Uh, okay,” Claire cut in, “that’s fantastic. Glad you’re liking this, but we still have other things to worry about.”
“Thirty years ago,” Draven went on, unimpeded by reason. “GlasCorp snatched part of the clan – all the women, most of the cubs, and a handful of the warriors. Stone and Fury, apparently, among those taken. They’re marked just like you are,” he was speaking to Rogue just then. “But it’s strange – one of the pairs had to have been marked after the kidnapping. It’s almost like our bodies, our DNA, knew that something was amiss. And so now we find ourselves with two sets of alphas. It’s happened before, plenty of times, but never has it happened and then all the alphas came back together.”
He was so thoughtful and interested in his little theory that no one particularly wanted to interrupt his musing. And so for a moment, they just watched. King and Stone exchanged another set of blows that would have severed the head of a normal human, but they just kept on like nothing had happened.
And then, what he’d said finally hit Claire. “Wait a second,” she said. “Twenty years? But that’s not possible, Eckert’s been the lead on this project the whol
e time it’s existed. He’s only in his forties. He’s smart, even if he is a fucking asshole, but not smart enough to start working at GlasCorp when he was like ten.”
“I’ve killed him once,” Fury said, finally drawing Rogue’s attention from the fight. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from all that time in a holding cell it’s that reason doesn’t particularly apply anymore. And we live longer than humans anyway – hundreds of years sometimes. Do you think it’s possible that—“
“An immortality serum,” Draven breathed. His revelation was punctuated by King headbutting Stone so hard that Stone’s entire body flew backward and into a tree trunk. It didn’t faze him though – he was back in King’s face a split second later. “I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but then again, what doesn’t?”
The two bears were finally starting to wear out. King swung wildly, but without much heart. His paw bounced harmlessly off Stone’s chest, and even though he laughed at the effort, the other bear did almost exactly the same thing – swinging a paw that pitifully met its mark and did absolutely nothing.
They stared sour faces into one another’s eyes. Rogue and Fury exchanged a glance of resigned consternation more than anything else.
“What happens now?” Claire asked, looking to Draven for advice as the two massive half-bears collapsed, holding one another erect with nothing but the weight of their own bodies and the fact that they both have massive legs. “Do we just keep going and waiting for someone to kill someone else? Do we go look for Eckert and demand answers? Or can we please just act like fucking adults and stop trying to murder each other?”
Fury sighed. Rogue gave him another look of resignation. “I’m thinking,” the smug-smirking bear said to Claire, “eventually we’ll come to that. For now though, we better avoid antagonizing them.”
Draven nodded, gravely serious. “That’s a good idea. We’ll need to figure out a plan for the rest of the bears anyway. If what they say is true, then almost all of the clan has survived, although some might be a little the worse for wear.”
“We’re finished here,” King said, as soon as he regained enough of his strength to stand on his own, no longer supported by the other alpha, who he was so irritated with for existing. “They can survive on their own, if that’s their wish.”
Rogue heaved a heavy sigh, not even bothering to pretend he wasn’t completely unimpressed with the whole situation.
“We’re done here,” Stone announced, almost at exactly the same time, and in almost exactly the same voice. “They can go right on doing whatever they wish. I’m saving my people.”
“But brother,” Fury said, though Draven was trying to shush him. “They want the same thing. You’re being an idiot.”
Being called on it didn’t have much effect except for causing the massive bear to frown deeply, in a way that reminded Claire of a surly teenager.
“Fine then,” Fury sighed just like Rogue had. In fact, the similarity was so close that Claire, Jill, and Draven exchanged a glance, and more than one eyebrow was arched in response.
There were a lot of stolid glances, a lot of pissed off glares.
And then, all at once, Stone and Fury rose, grabbed Claire, and that was that. They were gone. As they went, Fury let out another sigh so deep and so audible that it could be heard even as they disappeared from eye-shot into the forest.
-17-
“I really wish someone would just tell me what the point of all this is.”
-Claire
The walk into the woods was long, slightly damp, and very cold. Claire wished the whole time that someone would tell her what the hell was going on, and why there seemed to be no end to the walking and the hiding and the secrecy.
Finally, when her feet had started bleeding from the constant hike, she sat down on a stump, pursed her lips, and said, “I’m sick of this shit.”
Stone arched an eyebrow. Fury smirked slightly. “What shit?” he asked. The grin he wore continued to spread until it was a full on smile. “The slinking through the woods and not knowing where we’re going and the constant whining and fighting?”
“Uh,” she looked at him, slightly confused at the hilarious pointedness of his words. “Yeah, actually that’s about the long and short of it. And aside from that I just remembered that I was supposed to call this guy and go on a date with him. That was before I got abducted by two magical bears and run through the woods into a bunch of psychopaths in gasmasks and... I’m honestly just glad Fury managed to bring Cleo back, otherwise I don’t know what I would’ve done, knowing that she was forgotten back at home.”
On cue, Cleo lapped at Claire’s outstretched fingers.
“There’s something else, too.” Fury’s face tightened. He was worried about something, Claire could tell, even with their very limited time together, this bear didn’t hide his feelings well. “Something more that we need to figure out. I ripped that man’s head almost clean off from his body. How could he have possibly survived? And that’s to say nothing of the other issue. Claire,” he finally noticed, apparently, “why are your clothes all torn up?”
She chuffed a laugh, smiled, and just started shaking her head.
“What?” he asked. “What is it? Is something the matter? None of them tried to hurt you, did they?”
She tilted her head back, letting the sweat-wet portion of her neck taste the cool, calming wind that carried through the woods. “No,” she said. “No one tried to hurt me except those gasmask guys, and when they did, I turned into a bear and ripped a couple of them apart. Or at least, I think I ripped them apart. They didn’t really react like they’d been hurt, and there didn’t seem to be bodies left.”
She stuck a finger in her hair, twirling a dirty curl around it, and even with the grunge and muck, her auburn curl sprung back defiantly. “Anyway,” she said, playfully, “I was just wondering if either of you knew anything about why I could suddenly do that. Turn into a bear, I mean. Because before I met you, my skill set included years of research experience, using vastly complicated laboratory machines, a PhD from a damn good molecular biology program, and a lot of experience with Microsoft Office and a bunch of spreadsheet programs.”
They were both staring at her, eyes wide open and mouths sort of hanging there in disbelief.
“Yeah well, now my resume includes ‘turns into a bear; can murder gasmask wearing orderlies at fake hospitals,” she said with a wry look on her face. “So, what of it? Is it some latent talent I had buried deep inside that only came out when we you two gave me all kinds of wild orgasms? Sorta like, I dunno, rolling your tongue into those weird ruffles?”
Stone and Fury looked at each other, and then back at Claire. Stone had a gruff frown on his lips, while Fury was kind of grinning. “What do you mean, orderlies?” the shorter, thicker bear, asked. Somehow he ignored the rest of what she’d said.
“In that hospital,” she trailed off for a moment, wondering why they hadn’t remembered any of it. Supposedly they’d been there, or at least, underneath it, so why the hell did they seem so clueless? “I ripped a bunch of orderlies apart. Look, I can do it again if you want – the bear part, not the killing gasmasks part.”
Fury kind of wanted to egg her on, obviously, from the way he was grinning, but Stone put a hand on the other bear’s shoulder, and gave him a stern shake of the head. “That isn’t possible,” he said flatly. “You’re not one of us.”
“Yeah, you think?” Claire laughed, though bitterly, and got back up off her stump-seat. “Or hey maybe, you could, I dunno, pretend to give a shit about something other than your weird fetish with acting as serious as possible all the time? And, maybe – just maybe – that could involve cluing me in on some tiny part of what’s going on right now? With me? Remember, I just fell into this weird world a few weeks ago. You’re already writing my curiosity off like I’m an idiot for even having it.”
It was Fury’s turn to be in command. “I don’t know,” he said, with honesty that Claire hadn’t much expected. �
�I just don’t know. Stone doesn’t either, no matter what he says. He’s as lost as I am, and that’s why I wish we could just... well, like you said – get over all this shit, and act like grownups.”
A month passed, then two. There wasn’t anything that changed with Claire, or with the bears, except that every time they shifted to go somewhere, she did too – albeit slowly and with a lot of confusion, and frequently with some embarrassing clothes accidents. They got braver, brasher. Eventually, that meant they even went back to her little house so she could get some clothes and even got a few of Cleo’s toys and let her sleep in her own bed for one night.
They couldn’t stay any longer though. There was too much fear of being found out. Though they did stop off at a Walmart to pick up a slightly crappy replacement for her phone. Luckily she’d had the presence of mind to salvage the SIM from her old smashed one.
That was the worst part, really. The fear, the not knowing.
Claire lived most of her life before the bears in fear from one thing or another. Now, at least, she thought, she knew what she was afraid of.
Then again, it had been two months where she’d just been running. No one had called her, no one had tried to find her. At least, if they had, she didn’t know about it. That was maybe worse than anything. Being an anonymous shadow, just wrapped up in a new world where no one cared or wondered. But, she asked herself, how often did anyone care or wonder while she was back in reality? How often did she get exciting invitations or phone calls to go out to exotic restaurants or wild parties before?
The answer was almost as awful as her current fear – not very often at all.
Still, the fact that she never called Nick – cute little ginger-headed Nick – bothered her. She wanted to do it, to get in touch with him, if nothing else, so he’d know that she didn’t skip out on him because of anything to do with him. She remembered that sort of thing happening to her, and didn’t want to make anyone feel that same sinking, acidic, hopeless feeling of being left alone for no good reason.
