by Lynn Red
I started to ask again, but he clamped his hand over my mouth, shushing me again. The warmth of his palm invited a kiss.
For a moment, I had to collect myself to keep from sliding my teeth around the base of one of his fingers and taking a big bite. Bears may be serious a lot of the time, but they do love a good prank at least as much as I do.
Still, whatever Craze wanted from me, whatever he was trying to show me, I didn’t want to interrupt. Just as I’d learned that bears answer questions on their own time, when they want to show you something, it’s nearly always worth the effort.
So, instead of taking a hunk of bear paw out of Craze’s hand, I just gently kissed his hand and slowly lifted my arm up and out of the furs surrounding the group of us.
The third thing I’ve learned is that it’s basically impossible to wake a sleeping bear unless he wants to be awakened. I guess it’s some kind of evolutionary step that werebears share with normal ones, but when one of these guys gets tired enough to crash? Honey, there ain’t nothing you’re gonna do to stop him.
I still liked to sneak. What the hell, I love me some Batman.
I gently kicked the fur blanket off my foot and slid a naked leg out from underneath the pile of warmth. The chill of winter was back in the air, I noticed when my slightly-hairy calf met the air and a second later, a heavy shiver shook my body.
A hand—Craze’s—met the prickled skin at the top of my back. “Quiet,” he urged. “I think I heard Grave snoring. If he’s snoring, he’s about to wake up. Or at least, he’s gonna wake up in the next couple of hours.”
I stifled a laugh so that it came out in a rush of air through my nostrils, and looking back, I saw Craze shoot one last glance at the two others, still happily asleep. Once we were outside the cave, I grabbed the shirt and jeans that I’d worn into the place.
The bears constantly teased me about my attachment to being clothed, but it had only been a week since I became an honorary werebear… much too short a time for me to start fully embracing my admittedly present naturist tendencies.
“Someday you’re going to wear those clothes so long they’ll just fall apart,” Craze said, taking my hand and urging me onward. “Come on, where we’re going isn’t far.”
“I can just buy more,” I said, trying to both catch my breath and stretch my legs at the same time. “That’s what stores are for.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Craze said. “I’m guessing you’ll just get used to your new life and stop wearing clothes entirely. After all, don’t you like that I’m always naked?”
I looked him up and down when we came to a brief stop. “Well,” I said, chewing my lip. “I guess it is cold…”
“Shut up,” he laughed. “Come on, not far now.”
“Where are we going?” I asked, marveling at the movement of muscles underneath his skin. “You can’t just drag me off into the woods and not say anything.”
“I can’t?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Well, since you put it that way,” I said.
He laughed again, the sound booming through my body. “We’re going to see the rest of us,” he said as easily as you please. “There are more than three bears, you know.”
Somehow… that had not occurred to me, not at all.
The only thing that popped into my mind was why it took so long for them to see me?
“Why?” I asked. “I mean, it’s been a week with us living in a cave and you three fighting off werewolves.”
“You clobbered that one fat one with a rock, don’t forget,” Craze said. “That was quite a shot.”
“More of a drop,” I said.
Something had happened to me in the week since my old life vanished into the haze of memory that fringes a dream you’re trying to remember, but can’t quite. I’d gone from a fairly mild-mannered science teacher to a kind of forest warrior woman. First it happened when I charged into the woods and next when I killed my first… well, anything ever. Next I found myself in a cave surrounded by three giant bears, and… I’m not entirely sure where to take that next.
But, underneath it all, I was still me. More or less. I guess.
“Come on!” Craze urged me. “We’re almost there.”
I’d barely noticed how much distance we’d covered and hadn’t at all noticed the lingering burn in my lungs, my legs, and the balls of my feet. “We better be,” I said, my voice falling off as we crested a hill and looked out over a clearing in the woods. “Because I’m—”
“Speechless?” Craze asked, as he wrapped an arm around my waist and pulled me to his side. “I know this has been hard for you, and I know you’re having a terrible time adjusting to all this.”
“No,” I cut in. “I’m not having a terrible time with anything. I’m confused as shit and I am being expected to live an entirely new life with no answers at all as to why. I think that’s a little different than ‘hard’.”
Craze grunted his assent and held me tighter. “Even still,” he said. “You’re brave. I wish things could have brought you to us differently.”
I was starting to lose my patience. Hey, a week in the woods with her only shower being a cool river will do that to a girl, no matter how good the lovin’ is. And in this case, since that first night with Craze, there hadn’t been any lovin’. Something about the ritual for mating having to be kept pure or some such bullshit.
Look, I’m not all into the magical ritual business. I didn’t even really buy it when I was in the middle of it.
I just can’t accept, out of nowhere, that all this shit I never knew existed is real. But hey, even someone like me, the eternal skeptic, has to eventually come to terms with apparent reality, no matter how ridiculous it seems to be.
“Adriana,” he said in that rumbly, growling, low-in-the-throat voice I’d grown so used to hearing over these past few days. “We need to go down there. I’m sorry for,” he trailed off, turning to face me and staring into my eyes.
“For what?” I prodded. Briefly, I considered laying out the laundry list of things that he could reasonably have been sorry for, but decided that I’d done enough of that in the past week. At some point you just have to swallow the anger and let things be what they are. “I thought we needed to be in a big hurry?”
Still he held me tight. Craze slid his arm back just enough to grip my hips between his two big hands. Staring into his eyes just then, I felt the burning heat that I’d grown accustomed to, except there was a new hunger to it, a new desperation that gave me a little start.
There was danger in his eyes; ferocity that I’d almost forgotten these gigantic creatures had inside them. We are all animals after all, aren’t we? I remembered his words, among the first he’d spoken to me, and felt a trill of excitement work its way in electric tendrils down my back and underneath the jeans that had been almost too tight a week ago, and were now beginning to hang slightly around my hips.
“Show me whatever you’re gonna show me,” I said. “Sorry, that came out sharper than I meant.”
“You deserve to be as jagged as you want with us,” he said before releasing a sigh. “I’m going to show you something that no human… at least, no human I’m aware of, has ever seen. I guess it’s possible that someone at some point wandered into our cubby and saw them, though they’d think nothing of them past—”
Something tugged at my limply hanging t-shirt, and I looked down. “Shit!” I swore, jumping back at the sight of a bear—much too large to have snuck up on me like that, but still much smaller than the three I’d met—with his teeth on my shirt. When I looked down at it, the bear snorted and drew back quickly enough that I, too, got a little shot of panic.
Recoiling, I pulled my hands back to hug myself, like I was protecting myself from some kind of unknown attacker.
“Gray!” Craze broke into a grin, and then a booming laugh. “How’ve you been, boy?”
The bear, gray in color, almost the same sort of gray as the underside of a thunderhead, looked up at me and produced a sound
that I took to be questioning. Apparently, I was right.
“She’s one of us, Gray,” Craze said, crouching down and placing his hand softly on the creature’s head. “You can come out, and say hello.”
I stared into the thing’s eyes, which were as black as anything I’d ever seen. He stared back, tilting his head slightly, in a way that indicated he was still slightly taken with disbelief. Instinctually, I extended my hand, like you would to greet a dog you didn’t know.
Just like that, he moved nearer. The heat from the little—relatively—bear’s breath moved around my hand. I could sense his fear, his trepidation, which I thought slightly ridiculous, given the fact that he could easily rip my guts out with a single swipe of his claw, should he wish.
“It’s okay, Gray,” Craze said, his voice almost unbelievably gentle. “You can come out, she’s safe, she’s one of us.”
The bear then turned his head toward Craze, and let out a soft grumbling sound. “Yes,” Craze said with a laugh. “Yes, I’m sure. She’s not a wolf in disguise. We’ve already had a run-in with one of those, and I promise, this one isn’t one.”
Memories of that girl, the one who caused me to run off into the woods after all, flooded my mind. A girl who didn’t exist, who I thought had gotten lost in the midst of a giant animal fight, that pulled me away from my simple middle school picnic and taunted me from a tree. Then, seconds later, fell down in front of me and shed her magical skin. Her laugh haunted my dreams since, and more than once I woke up with sweat on my face, running down the sides of my neck.
Craze was the one that comforted me most times, though Wild and Grave were starting to warm to my presence. He’d always seemed a little more human than the other two, or at least more attuned to his human side, if that makes any sense.
I felt a warm wetness on my hand, and realized that the cub had his tongue out, lolling it comically against my hand. A tickling sensation wormed up my arm that made me squirm like I hadn’t in a long, long time. It reminded me of my uncle tickling me as a little girl, and my writhing around, giggling uncontrollably.
“He likes you,” Craze said. His voice was warm and proud in the way I’d expect to hear a proud father talking about a toddler who had some spectacular trick she performed. “At least, he hasn’t tried to bite your hand off yet, which is definitely a positive. Last time I tried to bring a girlfriend home, he took a chunk out of her and I never saw her again.”
He stared at me, obviously waiting for a laugh. I cracked a smile, but didn’t give him the satisfaction of laughing at his terrible joke, although I sort of had to admit that it wasn’t a terrible joke. “You know,” I said, “I thought you never brought any other humans here. Unless you mean you tried to mate a squirrel or a rabbit or something and then he ate her?”
Let me get this out of the way: I’ve never really cared much about bears. I mean, sure, they’re cool, and sometimes they do funny things that you see in Facebook posts with a bear’s ass hanging out of a Whataburger dumpster or something. But past that, I never had any particular interest in them. I’m not one of those people who went out of my way to watch documentaries or whatever about bears.
That said, hearing a bear cub laugh? I nearly pissed my pants in terror.
The sound came like a peal of thunder than ripped straight to my soul.
I stared, mouth agape, at the creature that had his mouth wide open, teeth bare for all to see—long, deadly yellow daggers that seemed almost the size of my forearm—and bellowed a sound that was at once horrific and incredible to hear.
The immensity of all this hit me right in that second. The fact that I was the first human being, possibly ever, to be initiated into this secret world, seemed almost overwhelming and almost too big for me to deal with.
I felt a shake, and then a shiver, that went to my bones.
“Did I scare her?” Gray asked, edging closer to me, though he was speaking to Craze. “I didn’t mean to.”
Craze patted the little one. “No, no. Well, maybe. But she’s just getting used to us. I’m not sure she’s ever heard a bear cub laugh before,” he said.
“I,” I swallowed hard to focus my nerves. “Yeah, I’m pretty new to all this,” I said with a laugh. “It’s nice to meet you.”
I stuck a hand out, stupidly I realized, as the bear was still, well, a bear.
“Shake, boy, shake,” Craze said and then bellowed laughter so loudly that it shook me to the core. “Ah, I’m a real riot, huh?” he looked at me with a smile. “But no seriously, Gray, come on out. Trust her, she’s one of us.”
Before my eyes, the unsure cub shook himself like a wet dog, and as he did, inch by inch, he became a human—a man—right before my eyes. He had a young look to his angular face when he was finished, but he was thickly muscled across the chest and waist.
He smiled, and took my hand to shake it. Except, instead of shaking like a human would have done, he used his left hand to grab my right one by the back instead of the palm, and then he shook vigorously.
“Nice to meet you, mate mother,” the cub said, and then he stared at me for a few seconds longer before dashing off down the hill and going from hole to hole. I’d never noticed them before, but sure enough, in the clearing below, every rock, every pile of leaves, seemed to hide a cubbyhole.
Maybe that’s why we call them cubbyholes, I thought with a smile crossing my lips.
One after another, bear heads popped out of the holes, looking up at me with immense interest. Most of them were bears, yes, but a few—I suspected the braver of them, the more brazen and wild—emerged with human heads, chattering amongst themselves as they observed.
“Wait,” I said to Craze, when what Gray had said finally registered. “Did he just call me ‘mate mother’? What’s that supposed to me.”
“Ah, right,” Craze said, turning me to look at him again, and holding me by the waist with iron hands. “Yes, well, he’s just using a term that… ah… well, look, I think I’d better leave it to Grave to explain, because he—”
I grabbed Craze’s wrists and squeezed them as best I could. “No,” I said flatly. “I’m tired of being passed off. I know this is strange for you, and probably stranger still that I am, well, the way I am.”
“I like headstrong,” he said, almost as an afterthought; an excuse.
“Right, that’s good because you got me. Anyway, I’m tired of being passed off and told that I’ll get answers at some point in the future. What am I to you? How was I chosen and what the hell am I supposed to be doing? What is a mate mother? I’m not anyone’s mate, and most certainly I’m no one’s mother.”
“You were a mother to all those human cubs, were you not?” he asked.
“No, I mean I was a teacher, but—”
“That’s the word,” he cut in. “Teacher. Teacher.” He repeated it over and over, like he was testing the word out. “That’s what we need, that’s what you are. Mothers of bears are what we call tutors, teachers, instructors. But you must also care for them.”
“And the mate part?” I asked, smiling slightly and edging a little closer to the bear who had first touched me, the first one who made me feel what it was to be alive and wild in these uncontrolled, feral woods. “What about that bit?”
He smiled down at me, stooping slightly and kissing the top of my head. I noticed he was looking past me momentarily to the cubs in the clearing beyond. “I think you know about that bit,” he growled into my ear. “Though if you’re not sure, I guess we could try out some more practice right here and—”
I tilted my head away from him, and he took the clue to kiss me behind the ear, and then trailed gentle brushes of his lips down my neck to the hollow of my throat. Just as his lips caressed the connection between my collarbones, I felt him go utterly stiff.
“What is it?” I asked, realizing how tight the tendons in his forearms had gone. “Did you hear something?”
He shook his head. “Felt something,” he said. “Felt something I shouldn’t
feel. Something that shouldn’t—”
His ears pricked up and he turned his head back toward the forest from where we’d come. “That’s odd,” he said. His voice was distant and distracted.
I thought I heard at least a trace of what he was attending. “Wolves?” I asked. He shushed me again with a gentle finger on my lips. “I can hear them,” I said, although I wasn’t sure. “At least… I think that’s what I hear. Either that, or its wind going through the trees and sort of whistling.”
Craze smiled slightly, though he was still paying attention to something distant. “We need to get back,” he said suddenly. “We’re going to need help, or things are going bad real quick.”
“Why?” I asked. “What’s going on? You gave me an answer finally, but then you turned the whole vague, non-answer thing back on again and—”
A howl split the forest. Chilling, absolutely brilliantly chilling, it sent a shock down my back and through my belly. “Oh,” I said. “I guess that answers that.”
Craze barked orders to the cubs in the clearing in a guttural, harsh language I didn’t recognize. They scattered back to their hiding places, and just so, as soon as they disappeared from sight, there was no way to tell they’d ever been there at all.
“But what’s—”
“Not now,” Craze cut me off. “Hold your tongue, I have to protect you. The wolves are on the hunt, and the overseers are about. I can smell their tainted blood.”
His words were so pointed and so definite that I didn’t feel like questioning him.
“We need to get back to the others before they sweep in. Normal wolves are nothing to worry about, but overseers? Different story altogether.”
Before I really had any concept of what was happening, Craze knelt in front of me, twisted this way and that, and unleashed a roar as he shook his mighty head.
“Get on,” he snarled. “Now, climb on my back and hold on for dear life.”
I paused, confused at the immediacy of the instructions. “What?”
“Get on and hold on tight. I don’t like being ridden, at least not like this,” he let out a momentary bear laugh.
