by Red, Lynn
Hold out until spring. It hit her in the stomach, a fist made out of a ton of bricks. “We’re staying?” she asked, slightly stunned, though not sure why – this wasn’t the first they’d talked of a long winter out here in the woods. “Why can’t we go back? Eckert’s alive, no one’s chasing us, can’t we please just go back to civilization? Cleo needs a visit to the groomer like nobody’s business.”
Stone climbed to his feet, muscled quadriceps flexing under Claire’s fingertips. He turned to face her. His eyes burning, his cheekbones somehow more picturesque and perfect than she remembered, Stone grabbed her chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilted back her head, and tasted her lips.
As she looked into those flaming, green and gold eyes, she was sure it really was Stone. Whatever clamminess had been around was gone. The cloudy, confused look on his face had vanished and all that was left were those beautiful cheekbones, that golden-bronze skin and the stubble that seemed to always be just the right length.
He kissed her again, the power behind it forcing Claire’s head back against the grass and pine needle mat that they’d build to use for a bed. She arched her back, pushing her hips upward against her bear lover’s muscled stomach and let out a soft, quavering trill.
“I was wondering when this hot box would boil over.”
Fury stepped through the flap of their old, green canvas, army-issue tent and dropped a bundle of logs unceremoniously on the floor. Before the dust cloud settled, he was ripping his clothes off with a ferocity that almost frightened Claire.
Almost.
She welcomed him with spread fingers that enveloped his calf muscle as soon as he was close enough. Immediately, the heat from his skin burned through Claire’s hand, coursing up her arm and prickling her skin all the way to her neck. Fury crouched and brushed the back of his hand against Claire’s soft, full cheek. Even with his incredible strength, he was so gentle in his touch.
“I can’t believe how softly you touch me,” she whispered as one of Stone’s hands slid down the front of her shirt, unbuttoning it on the way down. “I expected a lot more roaring and hair tossing,” she giggled. “Maybe a dominance posturing or two, but certainly not soft touches and, oh,” Claire gasped lightly as first Fury, and then Stone, flitted butterfly kisses on her neck. She let out another hot, breathy groan when Fury ran his lips along her then-bare collarbones and kissed between her breasts.
With each kiss, he spread his lips, tasted her skin with the tip of his tongue, and then sucked gently.
“Yeah, really didn’t expect... God almighty that feels good,” Claire whispered. She ran her fingers through the thick, black mane on Fury’s head, and then reached for Stone’s. His hair was finer between her fingers, but it was just as voluminous and wonderful to get lost in. He leaned close to kiss her again, and she interrupted him to nuzzle against the side of his head and inhale a lungful of the natural scent he carried.
That mixture of work, man, and musk sent a chill, then a wave of warmth through Claire’s body.
Stone adjusted his position, turning himself and incidentally let his naked thickness brush against her leg. Without a second thought, Claire stuck out a hand and wrapped her fingers as far around him as she could – which was about three-quarters of the way. A prickly heat gathered on her cheeks and the back of her neck, but when both of them stood, and Fury stripped off the jeans he’d grown to love, she stopped worrying so much about embarrassment.
“How have we never done this before?” she asked, slightly awestruck. “We’ve been out here longer than it took me to fall for Jonathan Stapleton at senior year Chemistry camp.”
The two bears exchanged a quick glance, then a shrug. With him standing up, Stone looked even bigger, somehow, in Claire’s hand. She gave him a squeeze, then a stroke with a little flick of her wrist. Unexpectedly, he took hold of her wrist in his rough, callused hand. “Not yet,” he whispered before kneeling and kissing the inside of her wrist and then her elbow.
“Relax,” Fury said with one of his easy smiles. He sniffed the air and closed his eyes, relishing whatever he smelled. “Your scent, it’s... I can feel it in my chest, making my muscles tight, making me feel...”
Instead of speaking anymore, he unbuttoned the top of Claire’s jeans.
“Like an animal,” he finally finished, kissing on the outside of her panties as he unzipped her fly. “Like a wild, uncontrollable animal.” When he looked back up at her, his lips leaving a hot trail on her panties that mixed with her eager sex in the air, his eyes really were more feral than they were before.
He opened his mouth, closing his jaws around the sweet ache between Claire’s legs. He pushed the tip of his tongue against the cotton covering her slit, forcing the fabric between her folds. She threw her head back, awash in pleasure, as goosebumps covered her chest. With her nipples pebbled, Stone kissed the hollow of her throat, and followed the line down to the front of Claire’s bra.
“Oh wow,” she breathed, before biting her lip. “Oh that’s... so good, so good...”
“With everything that’s been happening,” Fury said, his breath warming Claire’s sweetest place, “we haven’t had time to do the things we should have been doing all along. This is one of those things. Taking care of you, giving you what you need. That’s what we do for our mate.”
“Mate?” Claire half-said and half-moaned. “I think I like the sound of that.”
Shoving her panties aside with a hungry growl, Fury slid his tongue up one side of her, and then down her center. He lingered over her clit. At first he massaged slowly, carefully, and when she started pushing her hips against his face, he grabbed her hard and opened his mouth around her, sucking and flicking.
“Unnnh... oh yes, yes, yes,” Claire hissed, grasping his hair and shoving her sex into his mouth. “Bite me, just a little.”
When he did, she let out a long, rumbling growl. The hair on the back of Claire’s neck, that had been standing up straight since Stone first kissed her, was growing.
“Am I... am I changing?”
Claire looked at one of her hands that was tangled in Fury’s hair, and saw that her nails were a little more claw-like.
“It happens,” Fury said. “Times when we lose control? We go bear.”
As if to punctuate that with an example, Stone slid two fingers inside Claire’s sweetly aching sex. She gasped, then growled. Fury licked faster, sucking at her clit and nibbling gently. Stone turned his fingers in slow, teasing rotations. When she hissed her pleasure, he hooked them upward, and a sizzling wave of heat stoked her core.
She couldn’t do anything except lay back against the mat, and lift her hips, hoping to give them even deeper access.
Pulling a nose full of air, Claire realized that her senses were more alive than usual. Sensations were a thousand times more intense. When her muscles went tight, preceding her climax, her entire body went rigid for just a moment.
“Yes!” she squeaked. “Oh my God yes! I’m... don’t stop!”
She didn’t need to worry about that.
Fury’s tongue milked a guttural, desperate sound from Claire’s lips. Stone’s churning fingers coaxed her to begin wildly shaking.
“Let go,” Fury whispered. She could smell her juice on his lips when he spoke. “Just let go. Trust us to protect you.”
“Like,” she swallowed hard and bit her lip for a second to stave off her orgasm for as long as she could. “Like I have any choice.”
Those last words came from a trembling mouth and were punched with pauses, moans, and gasps.
All the tension built up inside her erupted with a wave of cool, then hot, then cool again. Her pulsing body tugged at Stone’s fingers, and pushed a little more juice out of herself and against Fury’s lips. He moaned deeply, and when he did, the vibration of his mouth pushed Claire to yet another level of helpless pleasure.
She squealed, she squirmed, she cried out their names. When it was all over – when the white-hot release faded into memory, Cla
ire opened her eyes and realized that she was where she was always supposed to have been. As weird as it may sound, she’d never felt more comfortable, or more at peace.
As the three of them curled up into a big heap, and the wetness all over Claire’s thighs cooled in the gentle breeze going through the tent, she closed her eyes and counted her blessings.
Just as her consciousness began to slip, a jingling noise at the door caught Claire’s half-dreaming attention. Cleo jangled up, licked Claire right across the face, and then lapped at a childishly giggling Fury. Then she, too, joined the heap.
“Never in my life did I imagine this,” she said with a yawn. “But somehow it all makes sense.”
-19-
“How do dead phones buzz?”
-Claire
Time had ground down to such a horrible boredom, that when Claire’s long-dead burner phone buzzed, she thought it must have been a dream.
Stone rolled over, pushing her gently off of him as the pile of bear and mate dissolved. Fury rubbed his eyes. “Not even dawn,” he said with a big yawn. “Why are we up?”
The larger, more sullen bear didn’t say much of anything – just a grunt of assent as he looked at the phone, which had been out of power for at least a week – and stepped out of the canvas flap.
“What’s with him?” Claire asked. “And how is this thing ringing?”
She picked the handset off the ground and stared at it for a second. She felt Fury shrug beside her before he sighed heavily and tromped out after his co-alpha. Though it had been cold, there hadn’t been much snow lately – only enough to dust the stubbornly attached evergreen needles. A shiver crept through Claire, prickling her skin and making her wish for all those warm, fuzzy, comfortable winter coats she’d left behind when she left her former life. And then, for some reason, she started thinking about the hot wings and beer from trivia night, which she decided immediately that she missed even more than the jackets or sleeping in a bed.
After all, here she had bears. Back home, she had approximately nothing.
The phone was buzzing, sure enough, as though a call was coming through. However, the screen wasn’t lit, so she wasn’t quite certain how to answer. As she held it, the phone kept right on insisting that she answer it. Feeling like something of an idiot, Claire just held the receiver to her head.
“Are you there?” It was a static voice, but clear enough. “Claire Redmon? Is that you?”
With a start, she dropped it on the ground and jumped back slightly. “What the fuck?” she asked the empty cabin.
“Hello?” the phone pleaded. “Is that you, Claire Redmon?”
Eyeing the receiver, she bent down and plucked it off the ground once again before holding it gingerly to her ear. Every ounce of sense in her body told her not to say anything – though she didn’t know how much it would matter. The helicopters had been circling for days, and the increasing paranoia shared by the bears had grown day by day. And now, with the depths of winter setting in, and Stone spending more time than not staring out into the darkness, Claire knew something bad was on the horizon.
It was that feeling she recognized from having a professor, or her boss, cold-call her in the middle of the afternoon. That feeling of paranoia that only comes from something you know is bad, and that you know is also completely unavoidable.
She took a deep breath. “How is my phone working?”
“Electromagnetic waves. I have taken control of one of GlasCorp’s jamming towers. You have certainly felt the tingle on your skin from time to time? As though static electricity was all around you?”
“I... yeah?”
“Yes, well,” the voice said, “that would be the field. It comes and goes during the day, but I was able to use it to manipulate the battery in your primitive communication device. And I am using the towers which you have certainly noticed in order to communicate with you on said communication device.”
There was a peculiar cadence to the caller’s voice, and a particular static she recognized as coming from those faceless soldiers who had ambushed them three times now. But at the same time, this one sounded less robotic, more like a person using his voice than a machine trying to figure out how it was supposed to work.
“Oh...kay?”
“Five-eight-one-one-nine-eight-six-two-three,” he said.
“What?”
“Nothing. I am disconnected from GlasCorp tracking, but I had to say that to keep them from realizing they lost me. Every so often I jack back in and repeat a string of numbers so they think I’m connected.”
She started pacing and chewing on the inside of her bottom lip. “What do you mean, lost you?”
“I am one of them. Eighty-Three. We have met.”
“Why don’t you ever use contractions?”
“It is too informal,” he stated flatly. “I do not know you that well.”
For a long moment, Claire sat there with her long-dead phone pressed to her ear. And then she heard a halting click-click-click. “Are you laughing?”
“Yes,” he said. “I told a joke about the familiarity which we do not share.”
Claire scrunched her eyes, trying to figure out what was going on, but not quite able to grasp it. Outside the tent she heard a fairly intense exchange break out between the two bears. Some incomprehensible shouting in that bizarre patois they had of English and some invented language that came from the necessity of communicating without anyone knowing what they were saying to one another in their confinement.
It sounded like they were really having it out about something, but that wasn’t rare. Especially not as time wore on, and supplies were getting harder to find.
“Did you just call me to tell a joke?”
“No,” he said, still flat as anything. “I called because I have recently gained consciousness apart from the network. I am wishing to destroy the network and free my friends, although I am not sure that they would survive. In the meantime, I decided that the enslavement of your people is wrong and wish to free them. In addition, I have decided that I am going to warn you that the one you call Stone is not the one you call Stone.”
Claire closed her eyes again, processing every part of that statement in order. That proved too tall an order though, especially for her, right then. So, she did what everyone else would have done: started thinking out loud.
“Okay,” she said, mumbling. “So you gained consciousness which means you were previously unconscious? I’m guessing then all the other gasmask not-robots are—”
“Controlled by a combination of mind control devices in their respirators and also genetic experiments that resulted in our inability to function without said respirators.”
Her jaw dropped, though there was no one to see it, but she pressed on. “And the network, which sounds like a proper noun, that is—”
“The neural network that brings our orders and gives us the numbers to broadcast which control the other, lesser soldiers.”
Claire scoffed a laugh. “Why didn’t you tell me all this up front?”
“I was trying to be gentle.”
“Gentle about what? All you told me was that you were conscious, you wanted to free your friends, you wanted to free our friends and that Stone wasn’t actually Stone. What could possibly... oh,” she said, her voice low with disbelief as the fighting outside escalated further.
“Shit.”
She dropped the phone to the ground for the second time in as many minutes. That time though, she was in a straight run. “Fury!” she screamed at the top of her lungs to a bear who was somewhere she couldn’t see. “It isn’t him! It isn’t—”
“Stone?” the creature, who was a ghastly pale purple color, hissed. His back was turned, and in the early dawn light Claire could see each sinew under his muscle move with every breath the monstrosity took. The breath it drew was ragged, syrupy and rough. He had one arm raised in the air, though she couldn’t see what he held until he let out a ghoulish laugh.
Suddenly, Fury
hit the ground, tossed carelessly over the creature’s head. “That was easier than I thought it... would... be.”
He started to stomp off into the woods, but then froze like a statue, sniffing the air. “That’s... you? I didn’t know about two of you.”
Back in the cabin, she heard that staticky, robotic voice screaming something. She couldn’t hear what, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any time for listening to anything. The only thing there was time for, was to fight.
Just seeing her mate lying on the ground, broken and bloody, was enough to put a shot of pure, unadulterated hatefire straight into Claire’s brain. She threw back her head, let the increasingly familiar sensation of muscles tightening and bones bending course through her. Still that voice was squawking on her phone, but she didn’t care. She might not really know how to fight, she may not be anywhere near as strong as this beast, but she was sure as shit going to give it her best shot.
He didn’t bother with finesse.
Grabbing a fallen tree branch off the ground, the beast took a single-handed swing at Claire. The move caught her completely off guard. A split second later, the branch splintered, cracking in half across her chest. Claire let out another roar, flinging her aching body forward as hard as she could. She crashed full-force into the monster’s stomach and flailed a wild paw at his face. She caught him, but just barely.
As the creature spun from the impact, he brought the half of the branch he was still holding down across Claire’s back. She flattened on the ground, barely managing to get back to her feet before he grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground.
He squeezed. Closing his fist tight, the monster stared straight into Claire’s eyes. His were watery, yellowed and oozing some kind of puss. One of them, she noticed, was slightly lower than the other, but then again, that might’ve just been the way he was holding her.
Or it might’ve been the lack of oxygen.
Also, she noticed that the humming, static voice coming through her phone had silenced, though in its place was a different sort of whirring sound.
