by Red, Lynn
So one day, she did just that.
The phone clicked as though it was going to reject her call with yet another “this call has no tower to take it” message, but then a few seconds later, the goddamn thing started to ring.
Claire sat up, back comfortably straight against a tree stump, and stared straight ahead. It was an early morning – a very early one. The sun hadn’t risen yet, nor had either of the bears who had been her constant companion-slash-kidnappers. She didn’t blame them – she knew why they were doing what they did – but that didn’t make it any better.
She smiled because something normal was happening. Something that felt like a thing people did. She was so tired of running through branches and hiding under big lumps of humus every single time a helicopter whirred overhead. She didn’t even know why they were hiding. After all, it had been months since the last attack, and just as long since they’d parted ways with the other bears, and with Jill.
God, she missed Jill. That was the first person who seemed to really get Claire Redmon.
It seemed silly now, sitting out in the middle of the woods and buzzing a guy she skipped a date with two months before, but every bit of normality made her feel a little better. Claire had forgotten all about the wild, horrific feeling of being a murderer after she was told that the guy that Fury and Stone were supposed to have ripped ear from ear lived. So now, here she was, wondering what the hell was going to come next.
“Uh... hello?”
The voice came through the receiver, unsure and shaking, and obviously asleep. “Dad?”
I wonder if there’s something wrong with his dad. I mean, why else would he answer a call at... four in the morning asking that? Ugh, why can’t I just calm down?
“No,” Claire said with a little giggle. “Sorry, I have the wrong—“
“Oh, shit,” Nick said. “I can’t remember your name but I sure as hell remember you.”
Claire blushed, even though she was at least two hundred miles away from the guy, and any embarrassment she had was one-hundred-percent, completely and totally lost. “You... do?”
Nick made a sort of chuffing, scoffing sound. “You stood me up,” he said. “I mean, it wasn’t the first time I got stiffed for a date, but for some reason, this one didn’t make me mad. I figured you just had something important to do and got all caught up in it. I heard you guys talking about your job. Seems like a hell of a serious thing, with all the experiments and the door guards who don’t let anything through. Am I right?”
Claire shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and took a long drink from the canteen she’d filled the night before. “You’d never believe me if I told you,” she said with a smile.
Here’s the thing – she didn’t feel anything for Nick. Not after Stone and Fury. She didn’t feel like she was interested in him, or like she needed him, or anything like that. Except... in a way, she did. She did need the normal guy, the friendly guy, the silly waiter with the ginger hair and the freckles that she’d embarrassed with all the sex talk and the nipple clamps.
This isn’t copper I’m smelling, Claire thought, remembering the way Eckert’s sour sweat had tasted in the back of her throat the moment before Fury ripped his neck open. This is a different kind of... cleaner? Pine-Sol? Why would I smell that?
“Are you right?” she asked as her thoughts trailed away from the conversation. A bird flitted past and she snapped back. “Oh, uh, yeah. There was a lot going on.”
He laughed again. This guy was a real good sport for half past four. Or maybe he was just that desperate that he’d remember her two months later and be willing to take a call at such a stupid hour. Somehow though, she didn’t think so. Somehow, she felt that something wasn’t quite that simple.
Claire took a deep breath before she responded, and something in the air caught her nose. She sniffled, she snorted, and then unleashed a massive, almost unbelievably loud, sneeze.
Fury stirred. Stone rolled over, pulling the tattered blanket tight around his shoulders.
But neither of them woke. Neither came to. They both just shifted a little, then went right on snoring again.
“How much are you willing to believe?” Claire asked. “And I mean that I’ve got a real fucking whopper for you.”
Nick let a long, droning, humming sound escape his throat. “Depends on what you’re going to tell me. Is this going to be an abduction story? Because I should probably tell you right now that I don’t much believe in that stuff. I mean, I’m fine with aliens and whatever, but abduction stories always leave me wondering if I’ve had my wallet stolen.”
Why is he talking to me? Why would someone I saw for exactly eighty seconds of my life, care enough to talk to me like this? And why does he sound so interested?
“What do you mean, wallet stolen?” I’ll just do what I do best – distract him and myself both with questions that don’t mean a goddamn thing.
“You know,” he said. “Like someone took me for a ride. The abduction stories,” he yawned, and from the way he quickly tried to stop himself from doing so, he didn’t mean to have done it. “Sorry, the stories about abductions, they always leave me feeling like someone’s trying to sell me some class one bullshit.”
Claire considered what he’d said for a moment, especially in light of the fact that she, first off, hadn’t mentioned aliens at all, and second off, actually had been abducted, sort of, even if she wasn’t particularly wanting to be saved from her captors. Or... had she been kidnapped? They had given her a choice of going with them or not. Their words still echoed in her ears – come with us, we can’t protect you otherwise – as she had cried out to be either saved or taken away from all the carnage and the terror.
Of course, as hours turned into days, she’d stopped worrying so much about all that. And then when she found out Eckert was somehow still alive? Yeah, none of it mattered one damn whit. That’s what her dad always said instead of “shit”.
“No,” she said. “I wasn’t abducted by anything. And I don’t really know how to say this, but I’m sorry I never called.”
He made a clicking sound. It was like he slapped his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Sorry?” he asked. “I gotta be honest. I’ve never had someone not call me for two months, and then call and apologize for not calling me.”
Both of them laughed at the same time.
“You asked if I had been pulled away on something important?” she asked.
“Yeah, I mean, some weird, secretive work project. I heard you guys talking about working at GlasCorp. I know that place is pretty...” he whistled The Twilight Zone theme music to make his point instead of bothering with words.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that I’ve read some stuff, heard some things. I mean,” Nick had fully woken up by then. His voice perked up, and he no longer sounded like a sleepy frog. “I mean, everyone’s heard the stories, right? I figured you were just on some secret project and not allowed to talk to anyone until it was over.”
His innocent naiveté just about stunned Claire as she sat on a stump, staring at the first fiery fingers of dawn. Along the ridge where she and Fury and Stone had settled in to an uneasy camp, the side of a mountain fell away in a sheer cliff. They’d wandered far and wide, but this was the most off-the-grid, wilderness-surrounded place they’d ever been. And that’s saying quite a bit for a threesome who had been in the deep woods.
This was the sort of place regular bears came through every so often.
Of course, those weren’t much of an issue, given the circumstances.
“Nothing important,” she said with a grin. “No, nothing like that. I just... I lost track of time is all. I don’t know how else to explain it. I was one place, and then I was another. Kinda like a blackout except it lasted for two months.”
“Then,” he paused for a second. A brief, but courteous second, because this was when he was going to drop the bomb. “Why the hell did you wait two months to call me?�
��
It wasn’t an atom bomb, because it didn’t destroy like eight square miles around her.
But damn if that question did make one hell of a mess in Claire Redmon’s brain.
She looked at her phone – eighteen percent still left in super power saver mode – and clicked to end the call. She hated it when she did, she felt like she was abandoning the last friend she’d had. Except the irony of the whole thing is that Nick was the only person who apparently remembered her, and also had no idea who she actually was.
He cared more about her than her drinking buddies, or her co-workers. He cared more than her parents – who hadn’t called her since two weeks before the grand disappearance – and it was all because he just liked her smile.
Simple things. Easy things. Honest things.
If I’m going to give myself up to this, I have to really give myself up to it. I have everything I need right here. The old world, the old me... they’re gone.
The next sounds Claire heard – wind howling through trees, birds defiantly singing, and Fury snoring like a buzzsaw – reassured her that she’d made the right decision.
-18-
“Why is it always helicopters?”
-Claire
They woke, not to the sound of birds chirping and little frogs croaking, but to helicopter blades.
It was a sound that Claire hadn’t heard in weeks – and one she wished she could go the rest of her life never having to hear again.
The first thought Fury and Stone had was to begin a treacherous descent along a fairly jagged rocky wall. At the bottom of the climb was a riverbed with a healthy pile of dead leaves, which they clambered underneath as the chopper circled overhead.
For a second, Claire had the vague hope that Jacques and Draven found them, and they were going to finally convince the other two bears that maybe this weird clan war wasn’t the best course of action. But instead of friendly shouts, the blades just churned off into the distance.
“Do you think that... maybe it’s them? Maybe it’s Jill and the bears? Jacques?”
She looked over to Fury, his eyes hard and his mouth a solid, grim line. His response was an angry grumble.
“Why can’t we just go look for them?” she asked.
His arm was around her shoulders, warming her skin against the winter chill. He pulled her tight, looked at her for a moment before kissing her forehead, and then sighed. “You know why,” he said.
On the other side of Claire, Stone ran a thumb down to the nape of her neck, and kissed her sweetly on the inside of her elbow. “We can’t,” he whispered. “It’s the way we have to follow.”
“Yeah,” Fury said with another sigh. “There you go. If you ever start wondering again, you’ve got a ready-packed answer. “We can’t because we can’t. But I’m wondering something a little more important – why have the helicopters suddenly picked up again? It’s been weeks since we saw one.”
Claire wasn’t about to admit that she’d used her phone again in those early morning hours before anyone else stirred. She wasn’t about to admit that she’d done anything wrong – partially because she didn’t’ think she had, not deep down in her heart, and partially because she didn’t know how the hell she could have done anything wrong. Especially not how she could have called down a bunch of helicopters on them. GlasCorp had plenty of resources and plenty of men, sure, but magic? That was one thing they couldn’t quite manage.
Claire shrugged. “Maybe they’re just patrolling? Maybe they’re starting to get desperate?”
“That would actually make sense,” Stone said in his deep, super-serious voice. “They’re starting to regret letting us go. They’re starting to worry – what if we weren’t meant to get so far away? What if we managed to accidentally escape a trap? It’s worth considering.”
“How does that affect us?” Fury asked. “Suddenly we have some sort of value to Eckert and the rest? Suddenly we’re not just biding our time running from one place to the next?”
But then all the activity came to a screeching halt just as suddenly as it had begun. The woods fell silent, the birds started chirping, and all was well. Except for something that Claire only happened to catch out of the corner of her left eye – which happened to be her weaker one by far. She noticed that when she looked at Stone, not only was he ever so slightly paler than he had been in her recent memory, he was also kind of... clammy looking?
And my mark isn’t burning. The mate mark isn’t tingling. That’s gotta mean something, right? I mean, that’s how we feel each other, that’s how we know that I’m meant for a Broken Pine bear instead of a Four Sixes bear, or whatever.
She made a quick mental note to ask Fury what could cause the sudden lack of tingly feelings in her chest. The funny thing was that she’d grown so used to the sensation that she hardly noticed it at all anymore, except, like right then, when she didn’t feel it. But, magical crests and chest-marks notwithstanding, something was definitely not right with the taller of her mates.
“You okay?” she asked, standing up and poking Stone with her bare toe. On the one hand—foot—whatever, she kind of hated how Jane of the Jungle she’d become. On the other though, she felt more confident than she had in her entire life, bare feet or no. Three months ago she would have been paranoid as all hell about pinworms, or this sort of tick or that sort. That transition was another she’d not noticed until it was complete.
Sorta like, you know, turning into a bear. Thinking back about it, she wasn’t sure which one was more traumatic and less like her: getting used to being a were-creature, or getting over ticks. Probably the ticks.
Yeah. Definitely, definitely the ticks.
Stone, she realized, still hadn’t responded to her question even though she’d been prodding him with her toe for about thirty seconds. Usually he was fairly quick to irritate, either he had been replaced by a vastly more patient clone, or something really was wrong.
“Stone? Everything okay?” she asked again. That time when she kicked at him, he jolted slightly, like he’d been dozing in front of a TV and suddenly awakened by a commercial that was way too loud. “You seem kinda out of it.”
He looked up at her, that one green eye and the one gold one twinkling in the midday sun, but as she studied his face, something just seemed off. And it wasn’t the clamminess or the way he was staring at her, it was something very difficult to quantify, but something that she definitely felt.
“Yeah,” he finally said. His voice was hollow to the point that she hardly recognized he’d spoken. He’d never been one for verbosity, but this was ridiculous even for Captain Serious.
“Yeah what? Yeah something’s wrong or yeah everything is okay?”
Again, he sat there with his lips pooched out a bit, looking every bit the dejected, grumpy bear. But he’s never been clammy before. That’s...
“Stone!” it was Fury calling from past the clearing, out in the direction of the pup tent they’d been carrying around and living in for the last while. The tent was one of the better ideas Claire had on one of their trips into town to get more dog food, replace broken phones, get new batteries, things like that.
Rogue had gone off in that direction earlier to hunt, but as winter set in, the hunting became tougher to manage. When the other bear didn’t respond, Fury whistled with two fingers stuck in his mouth. It produced a sound so piercing and awful that any referee in the history of sports would have been jealous.
Stone just sat there, like his namesake.
With growing concern, Claire crouched down beside him – another skill she’d picked up recently, the flat-footed squat – and felt his forehead. Blech, so clammy and moist it feels like the slick cobbles on Bourbon Street. But no fever, or at least if there is one it isn’t bad.
“Just thinking,” Stone announced.
He wasn’t much for non sequiturs unless they happened to be jokes about his co-alpha.
“Right, you gonna expand on that, Siddhartha?” she asked. Herman Hesse would
have been proud of the way the bear just stared blankly into space. “Hello? Anybody in there?”
Off in the distance, she heard Fury grumble something about the only one who does any work, which slightly offended her, before she remembered he actually had cut most of the firewood and done a good bit of the hunting. Come to think of it, Stone hasn’t really been the same ever since we got back together.
“Hey,” she said again, stroking his arm gently. “Did you see something back at the lab that upset you? You seem haunted. Aside from the clammy bit.”
She flattened her hand on his cool shoulder, which he promptly pulled away. “No,” he stated flatly. “Yes, maybe. I can’t remember. I don’t know.”
“See something,” he grumbled, before laughing under his breath. “See something. See something. See? Something?”
It was all very strange, and all barely audible, but he just went right on grumbling and grousing, mostly repeating the same disgruntled phrase, but every now and then he’d sprinkle it with some new word or other. If the gibbering weren’t enough, he started swaying a bit. When Claire grabbed his shoulder again in a gripping moment of panic, he looked up at her, confused.
He was back to normal.
All at once, his skin was the normal golden-tan, his eyes twinkled like always, and he was most notably not in any way slick to the touch. “You okay?” she asked again, having just witnessed something she couldn’t, in any way, explain.
“Yeah,” he said with a slight smile. “Why wouldn’t I be? Something going on?”
“I—no,” Claire cut herself off. She decided if there was something amiss, there wasn’t any reason to prod a tiger. And if there wasn’t, then she shouldn’t be such a damn cowardly weirdo all the time. “You just looked tired, is all.”
That’s a good enough lie, I guess.
He shrugged. “Guess so. Winter coming in, hunting gets bad. Gotta get everything ready if we’re going to burrow down and hold out until spring.”
