by Lynn Red
I looked toward him, toward them both, I guess, and in that second I knew that nothing could be more pure or more honest than what was happening. And no matter what either of them said, what we were doing was real and it was true, and it made all of us whole.
“Where’s Grave?” I asked again, more because it was on the tip of my tongue and had to come out than because I really wondered.
Wild and Craze both stood, looked at each other, and as I flicked the tip of my tongue across one, and then the other’s tip, I let the taste of them slide down my throat with a deep groan. I grabbed both of them, squeezing my hand as far as I could around the girth of their cock. When I took a breath through my nose it was filled with the sounds of the forest and my two men, though the lingering thought that something was missing, somehow, wouldn’t leave me entirely alone.
I kept thinking of Grave’s disappearance, and then after that my mind turned to Todd and his involvement in all this. I’d meant to ask, or at least try… but… well, sometimes things don’t go quite the way we mean for them to go.
Wild caressed my hair, pushing the curls back behind my ear, and then on my other side, Craze ran his fingertip in a languid circle on my cheek and then down below my jaw line. “We can’t,” Craze whispered. There was a note of intense regret in his voice. “You know that, we—”
“Can do everything but give me everything I want.”
To emphasize the meaning, I gripped tightly on both of them and then kissed their tips, then slid my tongue around them one after another. Another thrill of sweat, and hard masculinity surrounded me, enveloped me, and then when I opened my lips and pulled Craze’s thickness inside my mouth, I could only imagine how good it would finally be when I did get what I wanted.
But that wasn’t the time.
“No matter what,” Wild said with hitches in his voice as I took him in my mouth and swirled my tongue along his head, and then down underneath to tickle the place that got him groaning. “No matter what we’ve got each other. No matter what Grave…”
He swallowed in a way that gave away more than he meant to give. Before I could prod him, I felt like my soul was being carried up and away. I was sailing on waves of emotion that I couldn’t control, and I doubted the bears could, either.
I looked to their faces, Craze’s upturned toward the sun, and Wild’s fixed on me. “I hate the lies,” he whispered, more to himself than to me, I thought. “Someday,” he trailed off, just repeating that word like a mantra, over and over again. But right then there were other things on my mind than questions of fate.
I slid my tongue down Craze’s shaft and then back to the tip, before sliding my hand between his legs and caressing him for a moment.
“Faster,” I heard him groan. “Faster, harder…”
My hands were moving quicker, my lips squeezing and pulling and sucking desperately on his tip. I pulled away to breathe, and looked up to see his bare chest covered in fur-like hair. Wild grabbed me, pulling me toward him. As I sunk down, pulling him deep inside my mouth, I felt him tense.
The cords and muscles on the back of both bear’s legs were standing hard and tight. I dragged my fingernails down their thighs to a chorus of moans and my name being whispered afterward.
“I’m close,” Wild whispered. My pulling away at the last second, as he swelled inside my mouth, wasn’t enough.
“Me too,” Craze’s voice was soft, but strained. “I can’t… I’m…”
I moved my mouth from one to the other, sucking hard, tugging on their bases with my trembling fingers. Wild was the first.
He gripped me, and I dug my nails into the muscles of his ass. He let out first a groan, and then something approaching a roar as his climax shook his body. He erupted, and I clamped down on him, refusing to let a single drop go. His warmth filled me, and a moment later, I reached for Craze, holding him at the base like an axe.
His fingers curled tightly in my hair, sending tingles of excitement down my back and between my legs as he thrust himself deep into me. His legs tensed, and then in a moment of blissed ecstasy, he gave me all he had.
I trailed my tongue along his cock, kissing him as I pulled away. The breath came hot and heavy from deep in my lungs. Every single fill of air was labored and hard to pull. But as my heart slowed, and my hands stopped trembling, the relief of having my bears right there with me—two out of three at least—began to fade.
Wild was smoothing my hair back from my eyes, and Craze curled his fingertips underneath my chin, staring into my eyes when I looked up at him.
“Things are changing,” he said softly. “Things that haven’t changed for longer than I’ve been alive are changing and I don’t know how to take it.”
He and Wild exchanged a quick glance. “Now’s not the time,” Wild said. “Besides, Grave is—”
“Gone,” Craze cut him off. “Gone doing who-knows-what and here we are, not mating with the woman we love because he told us not to do it.”
Wild shook his head. “That’s not true,” he said, “he knows the rituals. He knows that if we do it wrong, the clan won’t survive.”
I stood up, brushing straw from my knees. I leaned backward against the cool stone wall of the cave to catch my breath for a moment. The afterglow of love still clung to my senses, but the urgent way my mates spoke was sobering. “I asked where he went about four times and no one bothered to answer me.”
“That’s because we don’t know,” Craze said. “He vanishes for days, sometimes for weeks, and we never know what he’s doing.”
“It isn’t our place,” Wild said, finishing for him. “He’s the chief alpha, we don’t—”
“We fight his damn battles,” Craze snarled. “He starts wars and we finish them. He brings others into the fold and we just go along with him. He put her in a damn cage, Wild! Do you think he would have let her out if she hadn’t fought with him? She’s got no stake in this, but we’re just dragging her along.”
“Uh,” I put a hand on his chest, feeling the warmth permeate my fingertips, “I think that’s where I need to step in. I’m here because I want to be. I’m here because this is where I belong. Or are you going to tell me that’s some kind of set up too?”
“Set up?” Craze asked. “What are you talking about?”
“My boyfriend who was some kind of plant that lured me here? People I’ve known my whole life who aren’t real? Do I really need to list every single unbelievable thing I’m supposed to believe?”
I felt the air in my chest begin to heat and tighten in my lungs. “Why are you so evasive? Why won’t you just tell me what I want to know? Who the hell is Todd? And why on earth did you take me to see the clan campground and then bring me back here just for a fight? Or was that an accident? Was that just a coincidence? Do coincidences even exist?”
My cheeks were hot with anger. I didn’t know what I was doing, what I was saying really, but it all needed to come out. It had needed to for the whole time I’d been in this surreal fugue state of existence that was apparently real.
They exchanged another glance, this one lingered longer than the last one. “What is it you two aren’t telling me?” I finally asked, when my patience ran out. “If I’m here on false pretenses, then—”
“No false pretenses, no lies, at least not from us,” Wild said. He shook his head when Craze started to interrupt. “The wolves, the overseers, our cubs all slowly dying from things we don’t understand… it’s all real and none of it was made to trap you. As for Grave? I have no idea what he’s doing or where he goes, but I know that his heart’s good. Everything he does, he does to save the clan.”
“And he’ll save the clan,” Craze said, “no matter who it hurts, or how he has to do it.”
“That was ominous,” I said. “You mean… Shit, no, I don’t even know what you mean.”
“I mean nothing is the way it seems,” Craze said. “He might talk a lot about saving everyone, but when he says everyone he means the clan. Not us. Not you.”
>
“Wait,” I said. “So he’s willing to sacrifice me to keep the clan alive? But I thought my being your mate is what would save the… oh my God,” I shrank back, sliding down into a crouch against the cave wall. “I’m getting a migraine. I never should have come here, I never should have stayed. I want to be home. I want to go to school and have my boring life and my shitty coffee and I—”
“Listen,” Craze said, his voice low and dangerous. I’d never heard him speak like that, certainly not to me. My heart jumped up into my throat as he squeezed my hand. “There are things—lots of things—that neither of us understand. But I promise, I swear to you, that as soon as we know what’s going on, Adriana, so will you.”
“Why should I believe you?” I snapped. I’d had enough, and his low, whisper-hiss voice just pushed me over the edge into actual angry territory. “I want to know what’s happening to me, and I want to know now.”
Wild took a deep breath and let his shoulders sag. “There isn’t any truth we can give you,” he said shrugging. “I wish there was, but… you’re just going to have to trust us for now.”
“And why should I?” I asked, my voice snapping again. “I guess the only thing I can say for sure is that outside of being put in a cage and given a cobbled-together spear as some sort of rite of passage, nothing else was thrust into my hands.”
“You saved that girl,” Craze said. “Or at least, you thought you did. You killed wolves, and you trusted us enough to stay before.”
A howling, biting wind howled past the entrance to our cave. “I know you’re telling the truth,” I said. “Don’t ask me how, but I know. But if this goes on much longer, I—”
“It won’t,” Wild said. Craze nodded along with him and said, “I know you’ll get your answers soon. Because we’re getting ours.” He closed his fist tight, clenching it until the knuckles went white.
“Just as soon as Grave comes back?” he turned to Wild and laid a hand on his shoulder. “We’re getting answers, all the answers, no matter what.”
My guts churned in my stomach, my heart felt like it was going to erupt at any second, but I believed them. Why? I guess because I knew I had no damn choice.
6
“Enough!” Grave smashed his fist into the slab of petrified wood that acted as a table. Across from him sat a gray-eyed, steel-nerved man whose eyes were hard and whose jet-black hair looked almost impossibly vivid when compared to his sickly pale skin. “You promised me we wouldn’t do this again!”
“I changed the deal.” The man’s cold voice put a chill through the massive bear. “Want me to change it again? You kill the girl, or you bring her to me, and your clan lives. You act like a goddamn hero again? Well, do I really need to tell you what happens?”
Grave snarled. The growl in his voice rumbled from the back of his throat. “Why are you doing this? Didn’t you love her, Todd? Don’t you understand how this feels?”
The stone-faced man smiled in a way that vaguely upset Grave’s sense of reality. “Oh trust me, bear, I know how it feels. As for loving her? No, I can’t say that I did. Actually, I can’t say I did anything that wasn’t looking forward, one way or another. Are you going to tell me that you didn’t do the same?”
Grave didn’t respond, but only gripped the edge of the table in his massive hands, squeezing so hard his fingertips squeaked against the wood. “You don’t feel anything for her? You know how brave she is, you know her soul… and yet you are still just using her for this, what is it? A game?”
“It’s no game, bear,” Todd said with another grim, menacing smile. “It’s business. You want your clan, I want my slaves.”
“No more attacks? The wolves won’t threaten us anymore?” Grave’s face softened slightly. “Give me your word, for whatever its worth, and I’ll do what you want.”
“I don’t care about your idiotic wars, bear,” Todd said. “I want my slaves to keep bringing me the things that make drugs and that make me rich. If you want the wolves to leave you alone, that’s fine. And you know what’s even funnier about all this?”
“You’re going to tell me no matter what I say.”
“True,” Todd smiled. “That’s true. I don’t need her dead. I don’t need her brought here. I just want it done. She left me for you, didn’t she? It didn’t take her much convincing to climb into bed with three big, muscle-headed idiots, did it?”
“That’s not true,” Grave snarled. “She knew your heart. It didn’t take much because when I told her you were part of the whole game, she could believe it. If that doesn’t speak volumes, I don’t know what does, you coward.”
“Out!” Todd stood up, shrieking in his rage. His entire frame shook violently. “Out, now! Bring her back here, or bring her head, I don’t care. You have a week, bear, or I’ll make rugs out of your cubs!”
Grave stared back at Todd as the man raved, his hands flying around wildly and his black hair hanging limply around his sweat-framed face. “I’ll do what you ask,” he said. “But it might not be exactly what you hoped.”
Book Three – Ravaged
1
Smoke, fueled by felled pine trees and ancient mats of rotten leaves, seemed to bubble up from the ground underneath my feet. It reminded me of going camping as a kid.
My dad always woke up with the sun and made coffee in a tin pitcher, cowboy style. I never appreciated quite how difficult what he managed—drinkable coffee—was such a miracle until I was old enough to care about coffee, but what I did always appreciate was how he just sat out under a tree, leaned against the trunk, and stared at the water.
That’s just what I was doing. Except instead of letting my consciousness wash around a placid lake as dawn just began to streak across the sky, I was sitting in the mouth of a cave and watching smoke curl out of the ground in a small clearing.
“Why’s it doing that?” I asked.
Craze and Wild, two of my werebear mates, flanked me. We were all waiting for the clan’s chief alpha to return, but had no clue where he’d gone, why he’d left, or when he’d be back.
“The ground heats up when the wolves start fires,” Craze said simply.
“But… it’s their forest too. Why would they light fires?”
Looking at me with his golden-flecked eyes sparkling in the early morning light, Wild winced slightly. “They don’t have any choice. They just do what they’re told.”
I thought about that for a second, wondering exactly what it meant, but before I could come up with another leading question, Craze spoke up again. “Like all of us do, I guess,” he said with his head turned down towards the ground. He stared at his bare toes and wiggled them for a moment.
“That was unnecessarily dark, I guess,” he said with a grin. “Look, even with all the confusion and all that, at least we have each other, right?”
I lay my head on his shoulder, and he cupped my cheek with an inhumanly warm palm. That’s the thing about bears—well, one of many, many things about bears I guess—they’re just hot. They have this skin that just burns when you touch it. Their hair feels like a fur coat that’s been worn for hours, or like a couch that someone’s sat on for a while.
I guess that’s part of why they don’t wear any clothes, ever. Or it might be that they can turn into, you know, gigantic bears whenever they want. Not much better than that for keeping warm on a cold night, huh?
“What’s wrong?” Wild asked as he slid an arm around my waist. “You have that look on your face.”
“Nothing,” I said. A tear slipped out of my eye, though I couldn’t really say why. I wasn’t sad about anything particularly, and at that exact moment the panic of Grave leaving, and learning that my ex-boyfriend had something to do with me being here in the woods in the first place wasn’t particularly bothering me.
Well, it wasn’t bothering me to any great degree, I guess would be the best way to put it.
Really, all that I was thinking about was the girl who lured me in here in the first place. She had this bli
ssed, almost angelic face as she sat up in a tree and I fought off wolves. I had no idea what I was doing, no clue what was going on; I thought I was just fighting to save some girl from the 8th grade during a field trip gone REALLY wrong.
It was all a trick though. All a goddamn lie.
“It’s all lies,” I whispered, not totally conscious I was speaking aloud. “Todd, the girl, it’s all just—”
“More than lies,” a ragged voice, that sounded simultaneously worn out and desperately angry, growled from the side of our cave. Just out of sight, but it didn’t matter.
“Grave?” I asked, as Craze and Wild both climbed to their feet. I noticed that no one was in any particular hurry to rush to his side, which probably spoke volumes. Still, I was glad he was back, if nothing else because that was one less question to haunt me. He stepped around the cave’s mouth and into view. His ashen skin, eyes that were more dull than I ever remembered them, and again, the ragged way he carried himself immediately shot a spike of worry twisting through my guts.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, stepping forward sooner than anyone else and laying a hand on his shoulder. “You’re acting like you’ve seen a ghost.”
He looked down at me with a glance that was halfway between sadness and knowing. “Nothing. At least, nothing I didn’t already anticipate. We need to get back to the cubs,” he said with a growl. For a moment, he slumped over, and then, holding his side like he’d been wounded, stood up straight again. “There’s going to be trouble, I think.”
“The smoke,” Craze said, still not looking at the biggest of the bears. “The smoke started late last night… early this morning, I can’t ever remember which is which. Wait, what’s that smell?”
Sure enough, as soon as he mentioned it, the scent of burning pine gave way to something more acidic, more acrid. Whatever it was put a salty, thickly ugly taste deep in my mouth. The back of my tongue I thought I was going to be sick, but a couple quick swallows calmed that down.
