by Lynn Red
Then again? Nah, to hell with that. He didn’t have to deal with rules the same way anyone else did. Even if the cats in his pack might not give him enough credit, he was the leader, and no matter what they thought, he could do any goddamn thing he wanted.
“Be quiet, you idiots,” Exile hissed, though this time he had a smile stretched from ear to ear as he crouched and let his bones shift, his tendons lengthen and his muscles grow leaner and sleek. Black fur slid out of his skin, and a moment later, the only part of him that remained human was the claw and half-hand, upon which he limped when walking. He turned back to the others, growled, and then advanced toward the oncoming bear group who, of course, still had no clue they were about. Just the thought of sneaking up on a handful of bears and ripping and tearing them gave Exile a shot of excitement, but he knew what he was facing.
Ale’s tribe of bears wasn’t exactly a bunch of pushovers. They weren’t untrained, and they certainly weren’t weak. The difference for Exile against the previous leaders of the panther clan was that he understood this, and didn’t try to underestimate them just to keep up some idiotic vision of superiority. That never got anybody anywhere at best, and at worst it made the panthers complacent, and when you’re fighting for your survival, complacency is a bad, bad thing.
“Six,” Exile whispered to himself, continuing to advance toward the source of the distant sound. Then, he froze dead in his tracks. “They stopped. Breathing hard. Something’s up.”
He rounded on his dimwitted companions who had both stiffened on his command, though the two of them had their paws stuck in the air as though they were frozen solid. Exile shook his head slightly, and rolled his eyes before returning to the trail of the creatures he had to kill.
He shook his head again, as his strategy formed. “We’ll take one of them alive to use for bait. The rest we’ll kill or scatter, doesn’t matter much to me. They aren’t important.”
“We’re just gonna let ‘em go?” Rug crept up and whispered through his feline lips. “But ain’t that gonna let ‘em come back at us?”
“Yeah,” Exile said as a smile parted his mouth, showing his yellow dagger-like fangs. “That’s why we’re taking bait, too. No time for this. The sooner we get on them, the sooner we finish this once and for all. We get that woman, and the woods are ours. That’s all that matters. Oh,” he turned back, “the bigger the mess you make, the better. Really put on a show.” That made the pair happier than anything.
Before the two of them had finished grinning eagerly at one another, Exile burst into life. His sleek, inky fur blazed through the darkness only visible by the shimmering moonlight bouncing off his back. As he slid like liquid metal through the forest—around trees, over roots, through gaps in the undergrowth—his stooges just blasted through which seemed to work just as well, if nowhere near as pretty.
“Split up!” Exile snarled back. “Here they come!”
Without missing a beat, Rug and Post split off from their master and looped around the sides of the now-alerted group of bears who had assembled themselves in a defensive circle and transformed one by one.
Roars shattered the night and Exile knew right then that he wasn’t going to get a second chance at this. He was either leaving with a hostage and hopefully some corpses in his wake, or he’d be the corpse. “No panthers will ever live as prisoners!” he screamed, charging the nearest bear and easily clipping him across the face with a paw swipe and then locked his jaws onto the small, brown bear’s neck when he recoiled from the claw. “You’re mine,” Exile hissed into the bear’s ear as Rug and Post each slammed into a bear and went absolutely nuts.
His stooges and the bears were a tornado of blood, fur, claws and fangs as Exile did what he did best—retreated and thought. Dragging the young bear, who he figured wasn’t quite a cub, but wasn’t very much older than one, behind him, Exile was more pleased than he thought he would be. “Finish up!” he shouted to his packmates.
It didn’t take long three bears limped away, presumably back to their headquarters where they’d no doubt report what happened. The other two, well, they weren’t telling anyone anything.
The young bear thrashed as Exile held him fast by the neck. “You won’t get away with this!” the little thing squirmed and kicked.
Exile just laughed. “I already have,” he growled. “I already have. Rug! Post!” he shouted. “Follow those injured bears. I just got an idea.”
“Boss?” Rug grunted, obviously confused.
“You heard me. See how much damage you can do. Cut them off at the knees. That way when that great big idiot follows me, he’ll already be limping.”
The promise of more violence, and sooner than later, got them going. The thought of charging into a nest of angry bears and who knows what else didn’t even occur to them.
As they charged off, after the scent of blood that washed through their noses, Exile shook the youngster again. “Not long now, boy, not long.”
7
“How long are we going to be here? I’m getting a little stir-crazy.”
I could hardly keep my irritation to myself. In fact, I didn’t keep it to myself at all. We’d been shut in the cabin for four days at that point, and that’s four days longer than I’ve ever been shut up in the same building except for that one time I had the flu and didn’t leave my house for two weeks. Good God did I smell horrible after that. Either way, I was also half-unconscious for most of that time, so it wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
Oh, and Nana Singer was still unconscious. Ale had picked her up and wrapped her in some blankets before stringing a couple of blankets together and creating a pretty impressive makeshift hammock in the middle of the cabin’s main room where she could rest without either being bothered by us, or bothered by my constantly growing irritation. Look, I told you I’m not good at being idle, I’m a nurse for fuck’s sake.
“As long as it takes,” Ale said as he lifted the side of the tarp he’d finally nailed over the broken window, and peered out into the surrounding forest. “She’s got to recover, and we have to get back to the clan. Right now, I’m almost certain there’s a bunch of panthers in between us and the rest of our clan, and that makes our lives very dangerous.”
Sure, yes, wandering into a gaggle of murderous panther shifting villains sounds very dangerous. But the reality was, I hadn’t seen a single one since the first fight, and I wasn’t entirely convinced they were real. Of course, I hadn’t been able to figure out why this guy and his weird grandma wanted to keep me locked up in a cabin if it weren’t out of a real concern for safety. Whether it was mine, or someone else’s safety was up for debate.
“I need to get back to work,” I said, more to myself than anyone else. I’d tried explaining the necessity of not just vanishing from life and not telling my employer that I’d be taking a week-long vacation in the woods. “People are depending on me.”
“Would they rather you be dead?” he asked for what must’ve been the thirtieth time that day. His patience was honestly impressive. If someone asked me the same thing twice in a row I started getting testy, but he seemed not to have anything but an infinite well of Zen patience. “Because I think you’d probably be worth a lot less as a nurse if your guts were on the outside of your belly, and that’s exactly what will happen if we aren’t careful.”
I let out a long, heavy sigh. “Well, yeah, I guess it wouldn’t be ideal if my guts were on the outside.” There was no point arguing, and I’m not sure I even wanted to. Of all the people to be shut up in a tiny cabin with, I could have—and have—done a lot worse than a gorgeous, muscled-up badass with gold-flecked eyes who I’d catch looking my way every now and then. It was an almost bashful way he looked at me, but that was sweeter by a thousand times to know that there was something more human in him than just a big, brash alpha...even if he was that too.
There wasn’t a moment where I couldn’t breathe, though, which was different for me. Look, I’m not exactly a super-anxious sort of p
erson, if I were, I’d be a horrible nurse—although I do, sometimes end up sharing a little too much with the patients when they’re on enough pain killers to start trying to fish in their TV sets. That said, when I get into situations where I’m not entirely comfortable, or situations where I’m not in control of what’s going on at least to some degree, I can freeze up.
With Ale, I never even thought about it. We played all kinds of stupid card games, which normally ended with him bellowing laughter and accusing me of cheating, although I never did—he was just terrible, or perhaps very merciful. He dug an old chess set out of a cabinet and we while away hours with that, too. But the nights were different. As soon as the sun sank below the tops of the trees and the sweet, silent darkness sunk in, we talked.
God, did we ever talk.
He never seemed to get loud, not even when he was excited or angry or anything else. Ale just kept on with that growly, gravelly voice that got me more excited than anything else. It didn’t matter how much I tried to prod though, he never cracked. He never let on why he’d whisked me away from that accident scene, except that he couldn’t let me fall into “their” hands. I knew he was talking about the panthers, but I’ll be damned if I knew why or how or what made him make that decision.
“This is infuriating,” I said one night, after he’d trounced me in another game of chess.
“You shouldn’t move your pawns like that at the beginning of the game,” he remarked, his voice distant, and without any kind of emotion, whatsoever. “When you do that, you just make holes in your defense and let me see exactly what you’re afraid of. This time, it was a bishop.”
That got me thinking. “What is it you’re afraid of, Ale?” I asked, not really meaning anything by it except for hoping to open up another of our long, late-night chats to keep myself from going crazy with solitude. The smell of a night time rain struck my nose, and for some reason, I just had to get the tarp off the window. I guess Ale noticed me looking over that way.
“I’m afraid of being closed in without an escape,” he whispered. “I’m afraid of never hearing the rain or smelling the air. I’m afraid of...” he trailed off, and blinked a few times. “Let me open that. It’ll help both of us I think. My head’s starting to hurt from the stale air.”
He got up from the card table we’d set up in the center of the bedroom, and didn’t bother detaching the nails, he just ripped the tarp off the broken window. “I feel better with this open anyway. Nana Singer doesn’t like wet air, she says. She says it gives her bones an ache. But, she’s in the other room, and she’ll be asleep for a couple more days so I doubt an ache is going to do much harm to her.”
Ale, with his self-sure voice and constantly strong attitude, seemed in that moment to be considering something. I can’t say what, I can’t say how I knew, but something inside him was being more vulnerable than I imagined a gigantic bear could ever be. Still, he had stopped short of answering, even when it seemed like he was damn near doing just that. So, me being me, I egged him on. “You were about to answer me before you decided the window needed to be open.” When he didn’t respond for a second, I continued, “which, by the way, definitely a good idea, because that fresh air is just about the most welcome thing in the world.”
“Lyssa,” he said with a plain, decidedly stony voice, “I’m afraid of things that are...that are out there.” He gestured briefly toward the now-opened window and smiled slightly. “Good thing they’re pretty terrified of me, too. But the fact is, there’s a whole hell of a lot of them, and there’s only one of me. Well, two of us, I guess, but—”
“I don’t think I’m interested in getting into a fistfight with a panther.”
“Fist fighting?” he laughed. “I thought this was Florida. Don’t you have different ways of dealing with things other than punching them?”
“Well I guess we can talk it out sometimes,” I remarked absently, more caught up in the sound of the wind beginning to whirl and the rain pattering softly on the ground outside. “Oh wait, was that supposed to be a gun joke?” I smiled, and just kept going, because when Alyssa gets going, she has a real tough time shutting up. “Pretty good joke, I guess,” I said as Ale chuckled, “and pretty true. Although my little Colt is in my car.”
Ale furrowed his forehead until his eyebrows almost knitted together. “You have a horse in your car?”
I stared at him with my mouth slightly ajar, like a door that wasn’t pushed quite hard enough. “I, uh...Colt. You know, the gun company?”
He let out a booming laugh. “Joking, joking,” he said, although the way he said it wasn’t quite in line with the way he’d joked before. “Totally a joke. I knew what you meant.”
“Right,” I said, trying to stifle my growing smile.
Ale collapsed into the chair in front of the card table and let out a loud, droning sigh. “I’m also afraid of losing things before I have a chance to appreciate them. I’m afraid of taking too much for granted.” For a moment, he paused with a thoughtful, distant look on his face. Ale ran his hand up and down one side of his face, with the whiskers on his cheek rasping against his fingertips. “And I’m afraid of missing chances because I don’t want to be hurt.”
He cleared his throat once, and then a second time. “Anyway,” he finally said, “I’m also scared of losing in Monopoly to you. I imagine you’re a hell of a nasty business tycoon. Am I right?”
His dumb joke made me smile, but I still needed to move. I couldn’t stop thinking about what it would be like to kiss him, to have him kiss me. I mean, come on, stuck in a cabin with someone that made one of those hunky fireman calendars look like a Sears catalog. As he was talking, and my cheeks started burning with blush, I moved to the window, ostensibly to get a big breath of fresh air, but really because I couldn’t bear hearing him talk like that because it kinda made me want to jump his bones, and that was out of the question. It was too soon, and I was far too guarded.
I’m not sure why, exactly, the idea seemed like such a bad one, but it did. Maybe it was just my overly cautious—which really I am, I swear, even if it doesn’t sound like it—I didn’t want to do anything stupid, or anything hasty.
The funny thing about it all was that the longer we were together, the more my thoughts turned to things that made me tingle in all sorts of places. I really don’t want to say ‘lady parts’ again at the risk of sounding like my grandma talking about sex. “Yeah, I’m kind of a Monopoly nightmare,” I whispered, gazing out the window, refusing to turn around. “My parents never let me be the banker because they were convinced I was taking untoward loans when no one was looking. Something about a conflict of interest.”
My voice was distant and I could hardly string the words together without having my nerves take over.
“You’re scared,” he said without looking in my direction. I’d just turned back to the room, and Ale was leaning back with his foot propped on the card table, and two of the chair’s legs hovering in empty space. “Why?”
As I started to answer, I turned to face Ale, but something in the distance caught my attention: it sounded like snarls or growls, but they weren’t anything I’d ever heard. Before I could actually say anything, Ale was on me. “Get down,” he hissed. “They’re here.”
“Who is?”
Three bloodied, beaten, and very nearly broken bears collapsed into the front door. Ale swung it open and caught the first one in his arms as he fell. The other two were in slightly better shape, but none of the three were doing much more than surviving. “They...Exile...he’s got Flame...ambushed...us...” the healthiest of the three said in ragged, pained breaths.
“Flame? They have the youngster? How many are there?” Ale was already beginning to tense. I could see his shoulders flex and his jaws clench in anger. “Where are they?”
“Two miles,” another of them said. “We were ranging and...”
Ale turned his head quickly to one side, and then the other. “They followed you.” He turned back to me.
“Get down! Now!”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
A black head, sleek and catlike, erupted through the window, and with one measured shot, Ale cracked the thing in the side of the head. It went limp for a moment, its tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth. Ale shoved it back through. From the other room, I heard Nana Singer stir. She moaned softly, the way I do when I wake up and my knees are stiff from it being cold outside.
Another handful of banging, thudding crashes slammed into the side of the cabin. I knew what they were, but I’ll be damned if I knew why they’d be doing it. “Why are they doing this?” I asked, huddling back into the bottom bunk bed, and hugging my knees. “What’s the point?”
Ale was hunched over with his massive shoulders growing even bigger. Watching the transformation was something to see—really something to see—but I could hardly watch. He thrashed back and forth, arching backwards as what appeared to be pure, distilled power coursed through him. He threw back his head and unleashed a roar that sounded like it should have come out of something four times his size, but when he finally stopped, and the whole thing was over, his swollen chest and massive arms heaved with every breath.
“Stay,” he growled in a voice that seemed to tear at his throat, “down.”
“Yeah no worries there.”
Another panther stuck an exploring head through the window, and this one lasted about two seconds before Ale grabbed the back of its neck and wrenched it until the thing fell motionless, limply dangling in the window frame. “We need to go,” he growled, “and soon. I’ll clear a path, look under the bed and don’t move.”
He dove through the window, breaking the sides of the frame with his enormous shoulders as he went through. It took a couple of seconds before I remembered what he’d said about the bed. I leaned over and stuck my head over the side, peering into the darkness underneath. Something silver struck my eye. Reaching under the bunk, I felt my hand close around a familiar, hard grip.
