by Lynn Red
“Angie?” I whispered. Somehow I knew that she’d hear me in the dead still, even if I wasn’t shouting. I can’t explain why that thought occurred to me, but as I squeezed the rubberized handle of the fire axe, I wasn’t thinking at all, I was just acting; just doing whatever it was that I thought would get the job done.
A cool wind blew through the trees, which took me completely by surprise, considering the smarmy, thick warmth of the day up to then. But then just as quickly as it began, it subsided, leaving me wondering whether or not there had actually been a breeze, or if I’d just had a little chill, the way people say they do when they’re about to see a ghost.
I took a deep breath through my nose, inhaling the dense aroma of green, earth and decay that seems to hang in forests. There was a piney scent that far in, which I hadn’t expected, given the oak trees all around me. In fact, even there where I smelled it, there weren’t any pines.
Dead still, I realized. All around me, nothing moving, even if I feel wind.
And there it came again, a chill breeze. Sure enough, nothing, not even a single oak leaf, fluttered in the wind.
I called Angie’s name again, this time a little louder than before. Just the sound of my own voice in the haunting, dead still of the woods gave me some slight comfort, but not enough to put the prickled hairs on the back of my neck to rest.
Something rustled near me, or at least I thought so; I was well past the point of being able to totally trust my own faculties at that point. Once again I squeezed the axe handle, and used it as an anchor to tie down my own erupting nerves.
I shouted out for the girl again, deciding that even a wolf for company would be better than the thick horror that had lay itself over my entire being. The next chill wind didn’t just prickle my skin and my nipples inside my bra, it also seemed to course through me, freezing me from the core outward to the tips of my fingers.
Starkly still, I crouched down, got a fist full of dirt, leaves and moss, and squished it in my hand. It was just unconscious habit, at that point. For one moment, I put the fat, pipe-like flare gun down on the ground and exhaled slowly, counting the seconds as the breath passed my lips.
You won’t hear ‘em comin’.
Won’t hear ‘em.
“Angie?” I called out.
The wind took on a voice. “I’m here,” I thought it said, whispering through the trees. It was so clear that I knew—just knew—I’d found her. “Angie?” I called again, and again she replied. “I’m here.”
Her voice was soft, almost leaf-like and fluttering, and everywhere I looked there was no little girl. “Angie, come to my voice honey! Are you there? Keep talking and I’ll come get you, everything is okay!”
I went still for a moment, waiting to see if she’d respond.
Nothing.
Won’t hear ‘em.
I couldn’t get the ranger’s words out of my head. I was so sure, so absolutely positive, that I was about to get this girl and get the ever living hell out of those woods, that my blood started pumping heavier in my veins.
Turning left and right, sweeping my eyes slowly along the greenery, I saw movement. Something rustled, just a glimpse of white along the edge of my vision, and I was sure it was her. “Angie?” I called again, walking in the direction of the shape I’d seen. “Is that you, sweetie?”
Ever closer to the green edge of the forest I edged, trying my best to differentiate what might possibly be cloth from the green depths. Again I saw what I thought was a shift of white among the trees, but when I turned the next time in the direction I thought I saw it, there was nothing. The density and the vegetation was almost overwhelming.
My breath came in short, hot bursts, and the chills running through me started to swirl with sickening heat. Flashes came and went, and before I knew it, sweat ran down the sides of my face, matting my black curls.
“Where are you?” I called out again. “Angie! Talk to me!”
Won’t hear ‘em comin’.
Won’t hear…
I don’t know what the hell he was talking about, because as those wolves came crashing through the leaves all around me, they were loud.
On nothing but instinct, adrenaline, and terror, I whirled in a circle. The axe head followed my body cutting through weeds and overgrown grass, even a couple of dried out sticks, but nothing else. The first one I laid eyes on fully made me wonder if I was seeing another ghost. He was enormous, pale as the moon, and had bright red eyes that pierced my soul.
I only stared for a moment before I wheeled around again and took another wild swing. That one hit with a deep thunk and sent the wolf sprawling to the ground.
Suddenly, the sounds that had been so completely absent only seconds before, erupted around me with such fury that I thought I’d been caught in a tornado. I hit another wolf with the axe and sent him yelping, but the woods all around me were surging, teeming, apparently coming to life with predators.
If this girl was out here, she was as dead as I thought—knew—I was.
Then it struck me that maybe she was a lure. It made no sense, but in those furious, terrible moments when the whole world explodes around you, all you can think makes no sense. Something caught my left arm with a sharp blow and sent a snake of pain up my shoulder and down my back.
I felt warmth where the pain radiated, and couldn’t hold the axe anymore.
Looping my other arm around, I pulled the plastic flare gun from my waist, and spun on a heel. I stared straight at another pair of blood red eyes and pulled the trigger. There was a whoosh and a spark behind the projectile and then sizzling, and the scent of burned fur.
“Angie!” I cried out again, because why the hell not? “Where are you?”
“Up here,” I heard her say.
In one instant, I lifted my eyes from the swarm of wolves drawing closer and closer, and saw her sitting in the tree, feet kicking above my head. “Thanks for coming,” she said, “but you didn’t need to do this.”
It was exactly the same girl from the picture, except she wore a filmy white gown, not the sharp-collared Polo she had in the photo. And then before my eyes she dropped from the tree branch, crouched on the ground and twisted, snarling, into another of the beasts.
I don’t know how, but I managed to stuff the second flare into the pistol, and fired again, straight into the face of another rushing monster.
For just a second, just a single, blessed moment, they backed away as though respecting what I’d done. They circled, and I turned. I counted eight in all, well twelve in all, eight still standing. And then, just like always seems to happen, in the worst moments, my mind flew somewhere else, somewhere far away, somewhere that seemed lost in time, and surrounded by the haze of almost-forgotten memory.
Better off with bears, I heard echoing in my mind. I guess so, anyway.
A rush of energy surrounded me, and it took a couple of moments before I realized it was fur. I gasped, pulling my hand away from the wiry coat that brushed it, and thoughts of how I never managed to do all the things I wanted; how I would die without ever really being happy, flooded through my brain.
But no pain followed. No vicious bite tore into my side.
Instead, another hard shape seemed to flank me. I chewed my lip, not wanting to look at what was certainly going to kill me.
The one near my left side rumbled a growl that thundered through my entire body. I felt the vibrations from my head to my toes, and it almost hurt me not to look down, but I just couldn’t. The closest analogy I can think of is that when you know someone is bearing down on you with a gun, you close your eyes and start praying instead of staring down the barrel and just waiting to die.
But then it nuzzled me, and growled again. And from the right side, I felt the same; whatever it was moved slightly nearer to me and rumbling in a way that I can only describe as reassuring. The fur I felt was hard, stiff and somehow, I felt it almost to my shoulder.
And then I felt the breath—the hot, almost seductive b
reath—slid around my throat, prickling the skin all the way to my ears. When next I drew air, my nose was filled with the hard, leathery smell of a man.
Craze. Wild. Grave.
The names flowed through my mind like a rush of water carrying crabs back into the ocean. I couldn’t quite grasp why I’d thought of three seemingly random, meaningless words, but then I just couldn’t stop myself.
I turned my head slowly, turning my eyes as far as I could to see what was by my side without having to turn my neck. Out of the fringe of my vision, just on the farthest part of my peripheral vision, I saw gold; fur of spun gold, glittering in the strange, otherworldly orange glow surrounding me.
I drew a sharp breath as the bear turned his eyes toward me. They weren’t the standard, bear-like brown color that you’d see in a zoo. No, these were burning orbs of blue, swirled through with flecks of deep, emerald green. Vaguely tempered with the idea that maybe, just maybe, those words about being safer with bears were true, I looked to the other side. Slate gray fur, and this one’s head was a little higher than the other. Turning to face me, the gray one let out an almost inaudible rumble that shook me to the core. His eyes were gold and gray. It reminded me of when the sun peeks through cracks in the clouds after an afternoon storm. “Grave?” I asked the creature, which under any other circumstances would have certified me for the loony bin.
He tilted his head toward me, let out another soft, almost gentle growl.
“So that makes you,” I turned my head slightly, “Craze?”
I swear the bear gave me a sly wink. By that time though I was so confused and so carried away by whatever bizarre thread of fate had plucked me out of reality and stuck me in the middle of what must be a magical forest full of dueling bears, wolves, and magical girls who lured me in that I couldn’t be sure of anything.
But if they were the ones from the dream, then there would be—
“Three?” I asked the empty woods as I felt a third presence draw up behind me. He nudged me with his snout, almost as though to tell me to move. I took a stutter-step forward, more out of confusion than anything else.
One more step forward, at the bear’s urging, and my foot sunk into what we always called ‘suckholes’ in the woods. It was an old gopher, mole, something hole, that had long been filled in with rotten leaves and whatever it was that inhabited the forest’s floor.
My foot went, and I went with it.
I sunk in up to my ankle and as I stumbled forward, an electric shock of pain shot through my leg all the way to my knee and the next second, I hit the dirt.
Not a moment too soon.
I turned to keep myself from wrenching my ankle, and looked up to see Craze’s golden fur thrashing over my head and crashing into something that could only have been a wolf. Fur flew, and the roars, claws and teeth were so vicious, so brutal, that I closed my eyes to keep myself from having to see whatever it was going on above me.
I still wasn’t sure I was going to get out of all this alive, but somehow those bears flashing back into my mind from the faraway dreamland they’d inhabited before gave me the briefest glimpse of hope.
If seeing them gave me a glimmer of hope, the immediate eruption of shocking, horrific violence somehow reassured that hope.
I opened my eyes to another chorus of howls and roars, and as soon as I did, Grave, the slate-gray bear, kicked me back away from the melee with as much gentleness as a bear can possibly kick a human woman. I pushed myself up on my hands, in a strange imitation of an upward dog. I spat out grit, dirt, and the broken twigs of leaves, and shook my head to clear my mind.
“Down,” I swear I heard something, or someone, say. “Get down, now!”
I did, completely on emotional reaction. I didn’t think, didn’t consider, I just hit the damn dirt.
All of the sounds to that point were absolutely nothing. Roars shook me to the core, yelps of pain and horror filled my ears and only a few seconds later, I felt myself being pulled to my feet by a man who was at least six and a half feet tall, muscled so much that if this were any other circumstance I’d take him for a bodybuilder, and who was completely, totally, gloriously naked.
“You’re big,” I said dumbly, staring into Craze’s swirling purple and blue eyes. Now that he was fully human though, they settled into a deep, violet blue color with only hints of purple to give any indication that he wasn’t exactly what he seemed. My eyes scanned from his stubble-covered cheeks to his hard-line jaw that would have made Dick Tracy jealous. I studied his face, drinking in the sweep of his cheekbones and the depth of his eyes.
And then I looked down.
“All over,” I said with a gulp.
He looked at me, cracked a smile, and then erupted into laughter so booming and powerful that it was almost as jarring as his roar. Instead of fear though, what gripped me was how his laughter warmed me where before I’d felt only terror.
“Come on,” another one said. I hadn’t put faces or names to voices yet, but I felt like it was Grave speaking, given the gravelly, rocky way he spoke. It just seemed to fit better than Wild. “We need to go before they come back. Once we’re back to the caves we’re safe and we have our clan along with our mate. Until then, we’re vulnerable.”
“Mate?” I asked, turning to see that I’d been right. Another beautifully naked man was standing in front of me, just as big as the other—in all the right ways and all the right places—who had stony, slate gray eyes. “What do you mean, mate?”
“You,” he said flatly, and didn’t bother to expound on that at all. “No time for talking, no time for waiting, we need to go.” He took a deep breath and looked all around us. Another howl pierced the night. “These are dead,” he said, “but others come. We go,” he repeated, “now.”
What happened next is far from my proudest moment, but I’ll be damned if I can manage to feel badly about it. Before I say this, let me get this out of the way: I am not a fainter. Nothing against those who are, but as far as I remember, I’d never fainted before. Blood doesn’t do it, shots don’t do it, hell, not even drinking way too much and singing Barry Manilow really loud until I run out of breath does it.
But being surrounded by three magical bears, one of whom decided to call me his mate—their mate—in the aftermath of what seemed to be a violent battle between said bears and magical wolves? Yeah, a girl’s allowed to faint. I vaguely recall the smell of dirt filling my nose, and then the smell of sweaty, gorgeous man.
“Catch her!” I heard Craze yell, “she’s falling, something’s wrong with her!”
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said with a wavering, “just got a weird feeling in my… brain…?”
Arms caught me before I hit the ground, and voices swirled around my head. One of them said something about how their mate could possibly fall over like this, and the other expressed concern that I might sprain myself by falling. A third—Wild, I think, but in my haze I can’t be sure—told them both that I was just having a normal human reaction to something very strange, and that they shouldn’t be concerned.
How many times have they seen a woman faint, I remember wondering. And if it’s something that happens with any kind of regularity, then why are they so confused?
I felt muscled arms close around my waist. Someone had hoisted me up onto a shoulder, or maybe onto someone’s back. I couldn’t tell, mostly because my vision was a blurred and fuzzy mess. The strangest part of it all, magical werebears aside, was that I had some consciousness. I mean, maybe that’s what happens when other people faint, like I said, I have no idea. All I remember thinking at that moment was that I felt like a spell had been cast on me to turn my brain into a ball of fuzz inside my skull.
But then the fuzzy whiteness of the world began to narrow to a point. I felt the last shreds of myself fade, just like I was lying in bed, reading a book and slowly passing out from a couple of Benadryl.
The three bears strode silently through the woods, never once speaking to one another, but frequently excha
nging glances.
And then, just as the three of them seemed to begin to relax, there came another howl. It chilled me to the bone, pierced straight through my soul, and put all three of the bears on high alert. Two shifted, and the third held me in his arms.
I looked up at him and gave a soft, pathetic whimper. “Don’t worry,” he said—it was Grave I recognized that stony, entrancing gaze—and stared back down into my eyes. “You’re ours now. You’re safe. If it’s the last thing we do, we’ll keep you safe. But,” he was interrupted by a brief sound of violence, which made him smile, “it won’t be the last thing we do.”
I lifted my hands and cupped his face. How could such a massive, powerful, obviously dangerous creature of dubious reality possibly be this gentle? I couldn’t figure it out.
But I realized, as I was watching him, and he me, that I hadn’t doubted his reality. I hadn’t doubted the one thing that any sane person would doubt. What was going on with me? For God’s sake, I’m a scientist, or at least, I was trained as one. Why wouldn’t I question the existence of something I knew was a myth?
“Because I’m here, and I’m holding you,” he said.
I scrunched up my forehead, which made him smile. “You can read my mind?” I asked, and unconsciously lifted my head toward his.
“No,” he smiled again, chuckling softly. “But I can read your face. You’re wondering what’s going on and how we’re here and all sorts of things. It’ll all make sense soon, but for now, just know that you’re safe, and we’ve been looking for you for a long, long time.”
I couldn’t help myself, I just had to touch my lips to his. The last inch before we kissed was the longest of my entire life, though it lasted only a fraction of a second. When I tasted his sweat on my lips, and inhaled his scent deeply into myself, I felt all at once that I’d somehow, someway, found exactly what I’d been looking for.
What it was, though? I couldn’t even begin to guess.
There were more roars around us, more eruptions of yelped pain and cries of fury, but as my lips brushed his, and he pressed back against me, sliding his tongue into my mouth and exploring me, it all seemed to fade away into a memory… a memory of a memory, just like the dream I’d had that I forgot until just the right time to remember.
