by Lynn Red
For what seemed like an eternity, we were just there.
I held onto that moment for as long as I could, clutching this huge bear who had somehow—for some reason—decided that he was going to take me into his cave and do… all of this.
Even if I’d wanted to break the silence, there was no way for me to consciously do it. Every breath I took was filled with the scent of sweat, of our love, and of the man beside me. He held me tight, as though he was warding off something that was trying to pull me away. When he kissed me again, first on the neck and then the chin, I felt that yearning deep within and reached down to grasp him again.
He was already starting to harden when my fingers curled around him, and a moment later, I thought he was finally going to give me what I’d wanted since I first felt him. A rustling noise, distant, but still close enough to draw Craze’s attention, made him turn his head. “More than anything,” he said, “I want you. I want to feel myself deep in you, I want to feel you shudder and cry out for me, but…”
There it was again—the sound of something crashing toward us. “What’s that?” I asked.
He shook his head and immediately sprang to his feet. “Nothing will hurt you,” he said with such grave finality that I felt myself warm again. “Nothing will ever hurt you.”
His back was to me, allowing me to watch the lines of his muscles move under his tanned skin. With every breath he took and every small movement of his arms or his legs, I saw muscles flex, then relax. The sound came again, but he was already moving away from me. I reached out, but all I managed to do was drag my fingernails along his calf as he moved toward the mouth of the cave.
With him momentarily out of sight, I pulled myself up and managed to get to my feet. Getting my jeans and shirt back on wasn’t much of an issue, thank God, but that’s when I realized I didn’t have any shoes. At least, I couldn’t see them if I did.
Of all the things to fixate on, making sure not to ruin my semi-recent pedicure might seem like a bit of a strange one, and I’ll admit it’s not the most useful thing to worry about, but I was in such a haze that having anything to focus on was better than just wandering around blindly.
More rustling, more footfalls outside the cave piqued my curiosity. I hadn’t heard anything resembling the flashpoint of violence from before, so I figured I’d be safe to edge nearer the entrance and see what there was to see.
First, my eyes went across Craze’s back, familiar as it was in the orange light it was even more striking in the semi-full sun of what I thought to be early afternoon. He was standing beside one other man and one bear who I watched stand on his hind legs, and then twist back into human form.
Three of them, I thought. That’s all three. Wild, Craze and Grave, and they’re standing at the mouth of a cave and having a chat like they’re hanging out by the office watercooler and complaining about the season finale of Walking Dead.
Craze gesticulated wildly, lifting his hands above his head and turning his palms upward. “I don’t know,” I heard him say. “We were here and I was standing guard just as you said. We just… well, we didn’t. I mean—”
“So you didn’t mate her?” Grave cut in. His voice was tense and obviously none too pleased. But, when Craze said no, he relaxed a smidge. For a moment he just regarded Craze with slightly squinted eyes, and then turned to me as though he’d heard me from fifty yards away, creeping bare foot through the cave.
“Well, speak of the… what’s the expression?”
When it was obvious he was waiting for me to finish for him, I took a few more steps. “Devil?” I asked. “That’s not very nice.”
His shoulders shook for a moment. “Well no I suppose not. But you two did something very dangerous. Something that could possibly not have been undone. But it sounds like Craze had enough control over his faculties not to go too far.”
I flushed a deep crimson. I felt the blush burn hot over my skin, and thought for a moment that I’d done something wrong. “Did I do something I shouldn’t have?” I asked. “I just—”
“No,” Wild cut him off. His hair was as his name implied, wild. It was golden and shimmering in the sunlight; a mass of curls that seemed to stand up and move of its own accord. “We’re all animals after all. It’s just that for a mating to be right, for the ritual to work and for everything to go as it should, then all three alphas must do the honors,” he finished. His eyes bore into me from where I stood, drawing me nearer even though I tried to fight the urge.
“Is it safe?” I asked. “I mean, the wolves, are they…?”
All three bears turned to face me then, and instantly the hard glares they’d been giving one another during their apparently heated debate smoothed out. Craze and Wild took a step toward me, Grave held his ground.
Of all of them, Grave was the sternest, and the biggest. He was so broad across the chest and shoulders that he seemed to be almost an impossibility of existence. As I thought this, and watched the sun bounce off his skin, it occurred to me how ridiculous it was to judge a magical, shape-shifting bear’s reality or unreality by the measure of his shoulders. I couldn’t help but laugh softly to myself, which got the other two curious.
“What’s so funny?” Craze asked. He had a slight uptwist to his words, but I could tell he was serious. “Is something wrong?”
“It’s all wrong!” I threw my hands in the air with a gesture almost as dramatic as the one he’d made a few moments before. “This is all insane, it’s all ridiculous. I’m a goddamn science teacher! I’m boring, I have a boring life and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing in the middle of the woods being fingered by a bear-man-thing, and then being talked about like I’m some kind of princess to be protected.”
When none of them made a move, I stepped nearer to them and kept on letting my mouth just rattle out the things that were occurring to my brain. “I hacked four of those things up. Or well, I hacked up two of them and cooked the others. I don’t know what’s going on, or even how I ended up here, but I’ll have you three know that I don’t need any protection and I don’t need to be kept safe!”
They kept watching like they’d never seen anything so amazing in their lives. I felt like the lead actor in Hamlet and the audience was waiting with baited breath to see if I’d screw up the legendary monologue. Aside from that, my rant was running out of fuel almost as fast as I was running out of energy to deliver it, but I’m not one to shrink back from a challenge.
“And beyond all that shit,” I said, really getting into the roll of things, “I can’t imagine any of this is anything but a dream! I mean you’re bears. Or… you’re apparently bears. But you’re also apparently people. This isn’t real, how can it be?”
Wild was the first one to break ranks with the serious act, and smile. “You’re… I think you’re angry, but I can’t tell.”
I looked at him, staring daggers. “Is that supposed to be a joke? Or can you really not tell that I’m angry? Wait, that was a joke, wasn’t it?” My voice went flat. “I’m sitting here rattling off every emotion going through my head right now and you’re making a joke?”
He shrugged. “Seemed like the thing to do, you know, break up the tension a little?”
I glared hard. The other two started looking a little more uncomfortable in their shoes, and for a moment, I had the conversational upper hand. But then, I couldn’t help it anymore, and laughter cracked my hard, stern exterior. “Okay so I’m in the woods with two magical bears and one really, really shitty comedian.”
“Your words hurt,” Wild said. “They cut deeply, like I’ve been impaled on a spike made of a tree trunk that’s slowly working its way through my guts and will eventually come out the back of my neck and—”
“Okay, okay, enough!” I said, putting my hands up defensively. “Most comedians aren’t quite as, uh, graphic as that. Bob Saget excluded, I guess. But look, I was promised an explanation and so far I’ve gotten the most earth shattering climax I’ve ever had, and very little else.” I
sat for a moment, chewing thoughtfully on my bottom lip. “Okay on second thought, that’s a pretty good consolation prize, but I need to know what’s going on. You can’t expect me to sit around in a cave for the rest of my life and constantly be, what’s the word? Mated? By three giant musclebound bear-men without some sort of explanation.”
They exchanged another series of glances but it didn’t matter. I was getting firmly entrenched in my habit of just letting things fall out of my mouth without bothering to filter them. “Okay fine, that’s not the worst thing I can imagine. But I have a life out there and this isn’t something I planned for.”
“We can’t always plan,” Grave said. His voice was lower now, the anger was gone, but he still spoke with quiet conviction. “And when we do it often ends up falling apart. There’s more to all this than I can explain in a few easy words, but perhaps time will show you what I mean.”
“Time?” I asked, once again getting irritated. “What kind of time are we talking about here? My time? Your time? I don’t have time. There are two busloads of kids out there waiting for me to come back and bring some little girl who doesn’t exist with me.”
“Well that part you don’t need to worry about at least,” Grave said. “They left quite a while ago. From what I saw, that gray haired coward had them shuttle off after our spat in the woods. That’s where we’ve been, by the way.”
“They…” my words fell off. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “They just left me?”
“Humans aren’t the most stalwart of souls,” Grave intoned. “I’ve never much been impressed by them until now.”
“Now?” I asked in disbelief. “What’s happened to change your mind?”
“You.”
To say I was taken aback is the understatement of the century. “Me? What the hell are you—”
“You fought the wolves,” he said plainly. “You didn’t have to fight, but you did. You didn’t have to go out into the woods chasing a girl you’d never met, but you did. And the mess you made of the four wolves you took was… well, a bit shocking, but impressive nonetheless.”
My thoughts were once again swimming around, bouncing inside my skull like a pinball. “How am I supposed to process all this?” I begged. “I didn’t do anything anyone else wouldn’t do. I knew we had a girl missing, although we apparently didn’t, and I went after her. That’s what a person—”
He shook his head, which was enough to quiet my rambling. “Not any person,” he said. “The one for us? The one we’re meant to find? Yes. But any normal person would have done exactly as the gray haired coward did. Turned and ran.”
The way he kept saying ‘gray-haired coward’ reminded me of a pointed piece of dialogue from a movie. Suddenly, my knees went weak. As I began to wobble, Craze noticed my slipping, and caught me, easing me slowly to the ground.
I huddled myself together, clasping my hands around my knees. “But that girl… she was just bait? I saw her taunting me up in that tree, and then she turned into a wolf? I don’t even know how to start making sense of all this. I don’t even know what this is, which makes it all the worse.”
I’d started to shake with a combination of confusion, fear, and worse than everything else, the idea that maybe the world wasn’t quite what I’d always thought. Something about reality as you know it being unraveled before your very eyes can do strange things to a person’s mind. I looked back and forth between the bears, trying to make sense of my surroundings, but sense was the last thing I could make.
“A-a-and,” I managed, “he said my boyfriend wasn’t really my boyfriend? I don’t—”
Grave shot Craze a fierce look. “He said what?” the biggest bear asked. “You must’ve misheard.”
For a split second, I caught Craze’s glance, but he looked away. “I,” I began to protest, but then thought better of it. “I must’ve. In all the confusion I guess I could have heard a whole lot of things wrong.”
The tension between the biggest and the smallest of the bears, the one who’d been my lover, was palpable. I could almost feel the crackling of anger, but a moment passed and then it seemed to dissipate.
“Well,” Grave finally said, “I suppose you do deserve an explanation. I suppose you deserve to know why your world seems to have turned upside down at a moment’s notice with no warning.”
“Seems to have?” I asked, my voice once again laced with mounting disbelief. “What else would you call this? What else can I think when I go to work one morning, expecting nothing out of the ordinary to happen, and then end up making love to a bear in a cave one minute and being told that the people I trusted just up and left when I was out of sight? What else am I supposed to think?”
“Be more careful who you trust,” Wild said in a sideways, quiet voice.
Grave shot him a nasty glare. “Quiet.” The bear immediately followed instructions. “As for you, as for this, I—”
A shattering, ear-splitting explosion from outside the cave, somewhere in the nearby woods, cut him off. He grimaced slightly, and turned to face the source of the sound. I couldn’t see anything, but he lifted his head and sniffed the air. “No time,” he said abruptly. “Something’s here. Something that shouldn’t be. The wolves are coming and there are people in these woods who have no right to be in them. I’m sorry, mate,” he said to me offhandedly in a way that partially irritated and partially excited. “We don’t have time for explanations. This is a half-century coming and I’m afraid it’s going to happen all at once.”
He crouched, twisted his head back into a snarl, then a roar. Silver-gray fur slid out of his pores and right before my eyes, what was moments before a man was a bear staring back at me.
“He’s good at dramatic exits,” Craze said.
“And leaving off at just the right time to leave you hanging,” Wild added. “Listen, I’m sorry about this, but he’s right. It’s not supposed to happen like this. The mating isn’t supposed to be this fraught with danger and terror but… well, like he said—”
“Planning is usually the most pointless thing in the world,” Craze finished for him. “And right now we need to worry more about protecting you than about making sure you’re entirely satisfied with how you came to be here. Trust me?” he asked.
I was shaking my head. “I… I guess I’ll have to,” I answered.
“Yeah, I guess so. We won’t be long. We never are.”
And just like that, the other two crouched, roared, and were off like shots into the night.
And there I was, sitting on the floor of a cave, looking out over a forest I never knew existed. All alone, and wondering what the hell had just happened.
But somehow, underneath it all, there was this clenching, swirling, gnawing sensation deep in my gut that told me that against all odds—against all reality—I had somehow found my way to the place I’d belonged all the time.
Book Two – Torn
1
I never thought of Todd again. Not after I learned the truth about the wolves, and the girl, and the man who I thought loved me.
Then again, had I really learned anything at all? The whole carefully woven tapestry of crap seemed like it was unravelling but I didn’t know any specifics. I mean, I had no idea what Todd was, except that in some way he was connected to all this.
The only thing in my head, the thing that kept echoing around my skull no matter how I tried to deaden the nearly constant, throbbing ache that seemed to live eternally in my brain, was that my entire life—or at least the only part of it that I thought was stable—had been a lie.
A lie. All lies, every single thing.
I still hadn’t managed to figure out how such a masterful wad of bullshit had been perpetrated without my knowing. Past that? It was still fairly difficult to fathom that somehow I was so important as to be the focus of a massive conspiracy that dragged me kicking and screaming, with nothing but a flare gun and a fire axe, into a world that I never knew existed.
Then again, when I rolled o
ver in the morning and sucked air into my nose, it wasn’t the tepid, boring air of a central-Florida apartment that filled my nose, but the raw, almost feral smell of earth, woods, and… bears.
“You awake?” Craze growled softly in my ear. His breath caressed my neck, sliding along my skin and prickling as it went. “Quiet,” he whispered. “Don’t want to wake the others.”
Ever since the three alpha bears had taken me as their own, I’d become acutely aware of what I thought at first was an all-inclusive, tight-knit group of bears was in fact, a very fine balance of jealousy, secrets and circumstance.
I managed to grunt out a soft ‘huhn?’ in the moment before Craze closed his hand over my mouth and shushed me again. The scent of his breath sent a wild tendril down my back, but I managed to keep myself calm, if nothing else, because I didn’t think I could take another stern talking to from Grave, the real clan leader, about the importance of resting when it was time to sleep.
They all had their own ways, the bears. And before I start talking like some kind of modern-day Goldilocks, let me assure you that, no, I’m not. In any way.
It had been a week since they took me in, and about half that time had been spent fighting, either among the bears, defending myself from their constant assertions that I needed to be cared for—which I do not, thank you very much—and finally, from a near constant barrage of werewolves attacking the clan territory.
“Where are we going?” I whispered so faintly that I couldn’t even hear my own voice with any real clarity. Bears, after all, can hear a damn pin drop like a Sprint commercial from the 90s. In response, I just got a soft nuzzle in the nape of my neck. It sent a chill through me, followed by a soft wash of goosebumps.
I was starting to get used to never getting answers until the bear I was asking was good and ready to give it. Then again, Craze wasn’t exactly like the others. Wild, the third of the bears, had an edge to him, and Grave was very much the old-school leader, but Craze had a certain wildness about him that reminded me a little of James Dean, but with a good deal more sense of self-preservation.
