Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance)

by Red, Lynn

  “Sorry! Dropped the phone!” she shouted, as her once prized possession careened down into the laboratory and exploded onto the cold matte gray tile.

  “Two hundred twelve feet,” Fury said, with a surprisingly smug, sage-like tone in his voice. “I picked up a few science tricks in the lab.”

  Something whizzed past Claire’s head. She felt a torrent of air and pulled back at precisely the right time so that instead of imbedding itself in her face, the dart only left a scratch on her forehead. It burned – oh God did it burn – but that was better than a head full of whatever shit was in that syringe.

  Immediately she remembered Jacques’s wound and wondered if he’d had a taste of this stuff.

  “What the hell do we do?” she asked Fury, who had already stripped off his shirt, and was unbuckling his tightly-stretched jeans. “Uh... are you nuts? You really want to—”

  “Shift!” he shouted. “And jump!”

  She opened her eyes wide, nodded, and then in one moment that represented a mixture of absolute clarity, undying duty to her friends, and complete, unabashed stupidity, she jumped first and shifted second.

  -22-

  “That was... a long drop.”

  -Claire

  All Claire knew when she hit bottom was she was really glad there was a tank of water down there, and that Fury saw it somehow before he jumped. Otherwise there would have been a couple of bear-shaped grease stains on the steel tiling where they landed.

  The burst of adrenaline coursing through her ursine body was difficult to handle, but a crane arm snapping open and closed above her did the trick, especially when it caught a pinch of fur, ripping it out of her back.

  She opened her mouth to squeal in pain, which gave her a mouthful of completely tasteless water, as though every single thing that once lived in it had been filtered, distilled, or otherwise somehow removed. She sputtered, grabbed ahold of Fury’s leg and yanked him free from the claw that had snatched him.

  One deep breath later, the pair burst from the pool and landed on the cold tile-shaped steel they’d seen from above. The suits were marching slowly down their hellish conveyor, on to whatever horrible purpose they’d eventually serve. She looked at one of them, letting her attention fix for just a moment.

  Were all of these... these bodies, were they all like Eighty-Three at some point? A person in some kind of horrible suit? A human being turned into some kind of brainless puppet? Staring at the conveyor, which was still running on and on, a never ending march of horror, she wondered if they were ever normal or if they were maybe grown for this purpose?

  “We’re not gonna end up there,” Fury said, nuzzling her side with his snout. “We’re getting out of here as fast as we can.”

  She gave herself one more moment to look at the coats and the masks before she finally ripped herself away. “We have to find what he is,” she whispered. “We have to find out so we can tell him.”

  “He helped us,” Fury said. “We’ll help him. That’s the way we are.”

  Swallowing hard, Claire nodded her head and looked away. She had no idea where she was going, but that didn’t matter. Just the act of taking a step, one single step, was an act of determination. And just that first step was all it took to bring back her courage and her resolve. Having her mate beside her, and the other one missing? That was enough to make the rest of her decision.

  The first step? It was hard. Painful almost. The second was easier. By the time she decided which hallway they’d follow – purely on the grit of her guts – both of them were running.

  “Wait!” they heard, static words coming through their forgotten radio receiver. “Come back! Get your radio!” It was Rogue’s voice, clearly irritated.

  They both skidded to a halt. Fury went back for the phone and came back naked, in human form. “Guess we better listen to him.”

  Claire shrugged.

  “What is it?” Fury asked.

  “You’re going down the wrong hallway. Head east, Eighty-Three said he’d meet you at the bottom.”

  “How?” Fury asked, looking slightly confused.

  Rogue snickered. “He’s got a key. Jack ass left me up here as a lookout to make sure nothing else goes wrong. But... enough of my whining. He’s got a key.”

  Claire and Fury exchanged one more glance, she sighed, he laughed, and then they were charging off in the other direction.

  *

  The smell of gas was strong in the air.

  Not any sort of mysterious, magical, experimental gas – just plain old gasoline. Claire cringed as she and Fury dashed past an open vent which apparently was a pipe leading deeper into the compound, carrying a river of the stuff. What it could be doing, or fuelling, she had no idea, but it was a bit strange that this super-futuristic, underground complex needed that much raw gas.

  But God did it ever smell.

  “Left at the next junction,” Eighty-Three’s voice squelched through.

  “Where are all the guards?” Claire shouted back at Fury, who was carrying the handset. Apparently it worked, because he answered.

  “Off the grid. I cannot find them. They must have finally terminated my network access.”

  “Which means they can’t—”

  “See me,” he finished for her, or rather, was saying at the same time. “That means... Well, I am not sure what it means.”

  “They can’t trace you either!”

  “Well, I mean aside from that.”

  The noise from his respirator was still even, but was quicker than usual. And, if she listened carefully enough, Claire thought she could hear the clicking of those strange knee-high boots he wore thumping away on something that rang out with every footfall.

  “Are you running? Left here,” she said to Fury, who followed her direction, and somehow was keeping abreast with her. She took a fleeting moment to admire his nakedness, and particularly, the bouncing part of it that he seemed to not even recognize was bouncing happily with every step.

  “No,” Eighty-Three said. “Yes.”

  “Why did you lie?”

  “Just trying it out.”

  She would have laughed under any other circumstances. Under this one, she just chuffed lightly and asked, “What should we be expecting when we get wherever you’re going?”

  “You will know it,” he said, cryptically. “We have two jobs.”

  He coughed, which was very strange coming from a body that Claire had long suspected didn’t actually have any lungs, or much of a throat or a mouth. Still though, he was coughing, and then he started breathing harder again, to the point that it caused a slight bit of concern.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Do we turn?”

  “No turning. Yes I am all right. Keep going straight. You will come to a catwalk over a river of stuff which I will not describe. I suggest you avoid looking at it. Keep going straight and when the fork comes, jump straight off the end. There you will find a maintenance ladder that leads down into the river.”

  “We’re jumping into the river?” she was starting to worry, which she should have been doing much sooner. “The river you won’t tell me what it is?”

  “No, you are to jump over it. I suggest you not go in. Soon after you get to the ladder, I will come find you. Goodbye for now.”

  “What are we going to find?” she shouted, but was cut off by the handset going dead.

  “Fuck this,” Fury swore, hurling the receiver over the side. “Can you feel it? We’re close. Can you feel the energy?”

  For just a second, she did. But then she realized what it actually was.

  “I feel my mark,” she whispered. “He’s close.”

  *

  Eighty-Three was running straight down the hall he thought he’d never see again.

  Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure why he did remember the place. He’d never been there as far as he could remember, but something about it stuck out in whatever was left of his mind. Then again, he wasn’t sure if he even had a mind either
, or if it was just his robot brain manifesting memories that were programmed into it.

  “I am not a goddamn robot,” he growled, the words coming through his respirator in a quiet hiss. “Not a robot. I am a person, I have a f-family.”

  Person.

  Family.

  Those words hitched in his brain just like the hallway – the cold steel and tile hallway – where his boot heels thudded over and over in that rhythmic tune. When he went slower, he glided easily, but when he really got going, the fact that one of his legs was slightly shorter than the other became very apparent.

  Parts of him that should have been perfect – his slight limp, the way one of his ears worked less than the other, those things had long since made him realize that he was unique. Or if not unique, at least he wasn’t exactly like all the others.

  The one thing that really set him apart was his lisp.

  It was always hidden by the static that came out of the mask. But it was there. Every time he spoke, he heard it if no one else did. And all that meant that he couldn’t be a robot. No one would program a lisp into a robot. No one would make one leg shorter than the other, or one ear a little less functional.

  No, there had to be more than this. There had to be.

  Closing his one good eye, he wove through a complex web of tunnels he shouldn’t have remembered, but did. In the distance, he heard the rush of water, and knew what it was. He also knew who was down there, so far below, and spared a moment to hope they’d make it across the river and into the place they were going.

  With the next flicker of his mind, he thought how much he couldn’t wait to see them again.

  No way I’m a robot. No way. Robots can’t care, they can’t... love.

  The further he ran, and the more he knew that whatever he found at the end of his trek, he wasn’t a robot... and he wasn’t alone.

  In the distance, obfuscated by a thick, industrial haze that surrounded this end of the complex, was the door he’d been running toward ever since he escaped. Somehow – and he didn’t have the slightest clue how – he knew that behind that door lay the answer to his pain, the answer to the mystery of his existence.

  Drawing up next to it, he breathed heavier and placed his hand flat on the door’s brushed nickel handle. He swallowed hard, his throat clicking painfully. That was nothing new though – his throat had always hurt, speaking always caused pain – at least, since the first time he opened his eyes... eye, to find himself seeing out through the goggle.

  Behind the door, he heard a wheeze and a whistling. Grabbing the handle and steeling himself for whatever was behind it, Eighty-Three, the one soldier who had come to his senses, could not possibly have been ready for what he saw.

  *

  Claire and Fury instinctually grabbed for one another as they skidded to a halt at the end of the massive bridge crossing the river of sludge that flowed beneath them.

  It wasn’t the river that stopped them, or the thought that they might end up in it should one of them make a bad jump – it was the screaming of an extremely heavy door opening on heavy-duty hinges. Looking up, Claire noted the crisscrossing mess of catwalks and overhangs.

  “There must be twenty of those paths above us. What the hell was that?”

  She and Fury exchanged a glance. A heavy footfall hit their ears, and then a laugh. Syrupy, sickening, phlegm-lined and whistling.

  “Eckert.” Both Fury and Claire said at the same instant.

  “He found him, I guess,” Fury said. “And as much as I want to go join in the fun, we have something to do.”

  “Something more important than revenge?” Claire asked. “From you, that’s almost like me saying I found something more important than chocolate chip ice cream. Besides you I mean.”

  “We save them first, and then we go find Eighty-Three and Eckert. He promised us he was sending us where we needed to go, didn’t he?”

  Claire nodded. “Do you think he meant for us not to find Eckert? Do you think he meant for us to lose his trail? Or is it something else?”

  Fury looked up in response to another howl, this one followed by a clanging sound that carried down the metal walls. “I think he was sending us to our clan mates. I think he also knew where he was going to find out his answers, but from the way he’s screaming up there, I don’t think he was exactly aware he’d find Eckert. Or maybe he did, it’s hard to tell with him.”

  “Yeah,” Claire nodded. “But I don’t think he’s disappointed about it.”

  “Come on,” Fury said, grabbing Claire’s hand. “Let’s go. Don’t make me throw you over this river.”

  -23-

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  -Claire

  When they rounded the final slight turn in the catwalk and got a real good whiff of the river running underneath them, Claire just couldn’t help herself. She leaned over the railing and tried to take a look. It was too far down to see very clearly, but there was a slight glimmer of pink, like a hellish dose of Pepto-Bismol underneath their feet.

  “This sure isn’t A River Runs Through It,” she hissed. “God almighty what is this stuff?”

  “He said not to ask,” Fury cocked a smile. “And I think the river is running through it.”

  She laughed and was momentarily taken by the sweetness of his face, the beauty of her mate’s mismatched eyes and the way her heart sang when he looked back. The look in his eyes said he couldn’t stand to be so near her and not touch her, feel her, take a fistful of her hair and smell it, and pull it, and...

  Calm down there, Hoss, she told herself. River of slime first, massive rescue second, and then we can all curl up in a big furry pile and get to getting’.

  That phrase – get to getting’ – reminded her of some of the only good times at home with her dad, before he and her mom went sour and things just turned into a big mess. Claire looked back at Fury, who was tensing, obviously ready for a leap across a big disgusting river, and lay one of her hands on his bare shoulder. “Can I ask you something?”

  “I have no idea what this shit is, but I think I could take a few guesses.”

  She smiled again, despite the musky, coppery, piquant, cloying sweetness of the slime below. “Not about that. I’m pretty happy not knowing when it comes to that stuff. I mean about us.”

  “Oh,” he said, looking a bit like he was wondering if this was really the best time to have a heart-to-heart. “Yeah, sure. Although, should we maybe get this over with first? Those things are after us. Eighty-Three said they’d be coming, and I can hear the boots.”

  “Are we... a family?” she asked, staring earnestly into his eyes. “You, me, Stone – are we the real thing?”

  All of a sudden, the bear’s eyes narrowed. “I lived my whole life in this place. Thirty some-odd years of life, lived underground with nothing but artificial sun to warm me and lab synthesized food to eat. That water we fell in? The stuff with so little flavor that it was creepy? That’s all we drank.”

  Claire swallowed hard. She could hear the soldiers coming closer. It wouldn’t be long before they were overwhelmed, and against an entire legion of those things, not even the four alphas would have much of a chance – much less one of them and a girl who had just figured out she had some bear in her a few weeks ago... and still didn’t know how, or why.

  Undaunted, Fury continued. “We were tied up, beaten, injected with God-knows-what. And all for what? To test and make sure that whatever they were doing to our clan mates was safe to use on people. We didn’t shift, we couldn’t. They gave us some kind of drug that kept us in bear form. We had collars on, these shocking things that detected the nerve twinges of a shift and shocked us so hard that we fell unconscious.”

  “Wait,” Claire said. “Did I see you up on my floor? Chasing mice around a lab?”

  Fury cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t think so...”

  “How the hell did you get the collars off? A shifter-controlling shock collar sounds like something that’d be pretty loc
ked down.”

  Those thick eyebrows knitted together. “You know,” he said, obviously thinking back. “I’m not... I don’t remember. All that comes to mind is seeing you in the doorway when you came in, and then I felt the burning in my chest. I thought for a second it was heartburn.”

  He grinned in a safe, warm way that put a flutter in Claire’s stomach.

  “Anyway, that’s all I remember. Waking up, seeing you, and being free. I remember shifting, and ripping into Eckert, but nothing else. So...”

  Another howl from above shocked both of them back into action. “Do you think he had something to do with it?” Fury tilted his head upward toward where Eighty-Three was screeching like a banshee.

  “I think we might have him to thank for more than just this little trip,” she said. “But if you weren’t upstairs, then you’re also not the only bears who got out that night.”

  Fury stared at her for a moment, eyes a storm of green and gold. After he processed for a split-second that they might not be as alone as he thought, he turned back to the ladder. “I can barely see this thing.”

  She took the hint. The time for wondering and thinking was over. It was time to jump.

  “On three?” she asked.

  The rhythmic pounding of jackboots was closer. Claire turned back toward the darkness and saw that it was only when the world was dark that the soldiers became as creepy as they possibly could. Their eyes – goggles glowed red in the darkness, no doubt to illuminate the world in infrared so they could see just as well in the dark as in the day.

  “We’re gonna do this, and then we’re going up to help,” she said. “We have to help him find his answers.”

  Fury nodded. “I wouldn’t let him down.”

  “One,” Claire said under her breath.

  “Wait, do we jump when you say three or do you say three and then we jump, like you’re really counting to four? One-two then jump on three, or—“

  “You’re stalling. Two,” Claire couldn’t help but smile.

  She wasn’t afraid. Not one bit. Never once in her life had she been anything but a semi-ambitious scientist who kinda hated working more than forty hours a week, but did it anyway. Now, here she was, about to make some ridiculous leap, and save a bunch of bears.