by Lynn Red
“What the hell is that?” I said, putting the back of my hand against my mouth to try and shield myself from inhaling more. “It smells kinda like… Tylenol?”
The bitter taste of a pill that sticks to the back of your tongue and doesn’t dislodge when you take a swig of water gripped me. “Why the hell does the forest smell like Tylenol?”
“It’s what they make,” Grave said. His mouth was a thin, dangerous line. “The wolves are slaves, they do nothing but cook… whatever that is… underground. The overseers, they,” he trailed off, letting his eyes fall on me for a moment.
I felt a touch of the kindness he used to have, before he’d gone all cold and serious. “What is it?” I asked. “You’re scaring me.”
“I should be,” he said as he looked away. “Come on. There’s no time.”
2
“Do we really need to go toward the smell that’s about to make me throw up?” I looked around for support, but Craze and Wild were both off ranging a good distance from where Grave and I walked.
The big bear simply turned his massive, slate-gray head toward me, and narrowed his eyes. “Where’s your spear?”
I unhooked the blade that I strapped to what remained of my shredded jeans-turned-shorts and then took the haft from where it lay across my back. In the few days since he’d left and his miraculous return, I turned the weapon into something that had a couple purposes.
“That isn’t what we gave you,” he said simply.
“Well,” I considered my words, and then realized I didn’t care at all whether I offended the admittedly beautiful creature in front of me. “I figured I could use something with a little more utility.”
To show him what I meant, I extended the shaft and snapped the axe blade back in place. The bears gave it to me as a kind of initiation present. The axe I’d used to claim a few wolves back before we first met. I never pegged giant, magical werebears as the sort of things that would be sentimental, but I also never figured they’d have a taste for slapstick humor, either.
With another quick gesture, I detached the blade and held it, and the shaft of the spear, parallel to my forearms. “I can guard like this, and then swipe.” I took a few quick stabs at the air to show him what I meant.
“Put it back together.”
I did what he said with a flick of my wrist. “And now I’ve got, well, easier to show you.”
For a moment, I swung the spear over my head like I’d seen in kung-fu movies my entire life. It wasn’t pretty, but I think if anything was within reach it’d get a jagged gash. Then I pulled it back in close, stabbed a couple times into thin air and…
“Hey!” I gasped as Grave lifted an arm, and brought it down on the shaft of my spear in mid thrust. “What are you doing?”
He moved closer, still pinning my weapon to my side. Noises from the bushes on our flanks drew my attention, but his was fixed dead straight on me. “I’m making sure you know that I know what’s best.”
“For who?” I shot at him, my words quick and hot and full of bile. I couldn’t help it; ever since he left in the first place and the story started to unravel, I’d hated him more and more. Using not just me, but also the other two clan alphas to save everyone instead of trying anything else? “And where the hell were you? You can’t just disappear for days on end in the middle of a war and not expect someone to ask questions.”
“Not your place,” he said slowly and softly. When he spoke like this it was more dangerous and frightening than his shouting. Of course, he rarely did either very often which just multiplied the impact. “And anyway, I doubt you wasted much time while I was gone worrying about me.”
With his free hand, Grave lifted a fallen curl of my hair and rubbed it between his rough, long fingers. “You three are intent on ruining everything, aren’t you? I can smell them on you, you know. I can see the way they look at you; the way you’ve captivated them.”
It was my turn to narrow my eyes. “You have no clue what you’re talking about,” I said. “I did what came naturally. Isn’t that what you said all those weeks ago when you took me out of my life and put me into this one?”
A smile cracked his lips. As much as he’d angered me, as furious as I was, I couldn’t help but pause for a moment when he did. The intensity of his gaze was impossible to deny. The way his eyes warmed me to the core almost made me betray my better judgment. “What am I supposed to think, Grave? Craze and Wild have been with me, they’ve kept me calm when I had little bouts of panic. They tell me what they know, and—”
“Do they?” he smiled again. “Or are they just telling you what they want you to know.”
The noises on our flanks grew stronger. A familiar voice joined them. “We told her what we know,” came Wild’s voice from my rear-left. “Not like you’ve told us much,” Craze agreed from back-right.
Immediately I felt the heat of their skin emanating around me, through me. Just having them beside me was enough reassurance to start really testing my luck. And so, because sometimes I might be just a little too brave for my own good, pressing is just what I did. “I want to know,” I hissed, yanking my head back and pushing away from the giant, naked man in front of me. He lifted his arm and I stumbled back a few steps, almost tumbling to the ground before I caught my balance.
Without skipping a beat, I kept right on. For a second, I considered prodding him with my spear-axe-thing, but thought maybe that was a bit too far. “Talk,” I said. “You tell me what the hell I have to do with all this, and you tell me now, or I’m leaving. I don’t care if you try to kill me… hell, I don’t care if you do kill me. I’m not living a lie. I’m not going to sit around and be a pawn in some game that I don’t have a shred of involvement in.” For a second I thought that maybe I did—after all I was in love with two of them, and the cubs I’d seen were certainly precious—but I didn’t. No matter any of that, this wasn’t my world. Or at least, I was starting to feel very definitely that it wasn’t.
“You told me almost a month ago that I’d have answers,” I figured by this point if he hadn’t snapped, I was probably safe to keep pushing. Like I said, I don’t always make the most logical decisions, especially when I’m pissed. “And here we are, me not knowing shit and you smiling like you know a goddamn secret that you won’t tell.”
“Uh,” Wild broke in and laid a hand on my neck, calming me almost instantly with his warmth. “This might not be the time.”
“Oh fuck all that,” I said. Look, momentum is a big thing in my life. When I was in college, it usually took me until the very end of the semester before I started a research project no matter how many I had and how stupid I knew it was. But when Adriana gets going? Look the hell out baby, to paraphrase Aerosmith, this train’s gonna keep a-movin’. “I want to know something or I’m leaving.”
“You’ll die,” Grave said flatly. “You have no idea where we are and no idea how—“
“You think I care?” I shook my head, shrugged Wild’s hand off my neck and swatted Craze’s psychically. “Like I said before, you pulled me out of my life and changed everything for me in one afternoon. Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I’m just some hapless girl who can’t do any better for herself than sit around in the woods and have really hot almost-sex with a bunch of bear men?”
I looked between all three of them. “Okay that last part is pretty good, I’m not going to lie about that. But I’m done. I don’t care who Todd really is, and I don’t care why the woods out here smell like a mixture of burning tar and a really bad hangover.”
Without thinking, or maybe because I’d been considering it all along, I snapped the axe off the end of my spear and lunged straight at Grave. He caught me, of course he did, but not before the point of my blade went right to the underside of his jaw. Both Wild and Craze came forward, but when I turned back and turned the blade just enough to prick, they froze.
“Ade?” Craze asked, his voice full of trepidation. “Do you think this is a good idea?”
&n
bsp; I chewed my lip hard enough to draw blood, and looked between each bear in turn. First Wild, then Craze and finally I stared straight into Grave. “No,” I said. “I think it might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, but you put me up against a goddamn wall and I don’t have a choice. You know what they say about honey badgers, right?”
They all looked back at me, obviously confused. “I mean,” Craze said, “they’re really mean little bastards. One time I found one rooting through a trash can and he just about bit my arm off.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling both because I couldn’t believe that I referenced a stupid internet joke when I had a knife on the throat of one of my mates, and because I felt just crazy enough that smiling was all I could do. “That’s about it. So, answers?”
Grave sighed heavily and I’m almost certain I saw him roll his eyes ever so slightly. In one smooth motion he snatched my hand away from his throat, twisted and squeezed hard enough to bring me right to the point of kneeling to relieve the pressure. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “I just don’t want to bleed any more. They can smell it.”
He looked around the woods with searching eyes. “Any signs?” he ignored everything I’d done completely. Just like with the whispering, the most impressive and the most infuriating thing he could do was just being calm.
“None,” Craze said. “The fires burned out, and the stink is gone.”
“I found a couple of tar pits and a few lingering flames,” Wild joined in, “but yeah, nothing there either. They must have already finished making that sludge they were melting.”
“What sludge?” I piped up. “Something, just give me something. Anything.”
Grave turned to me and regarded me for a long moment with those cold eyes that burned into my soul. “We don’t know,” he finally said. It sounded like an admission. “And we don’t know why they keep starting fires. And we don’t know why they’ve just now started.”
“And we don’t know what the hell Todd has to do with any of it,” Craze said.
“But we think he’s in it deep, because the wolves weren’t doing anything but being insane before he reappeared,” Wild added.
I looked at Grave. “Reappeared?” my ears pricked up. “What’s that supposed to mean? He isn’t some kind of Dracula is he? That’s the only thing that would be crazier than the shit I’ve already seen.”
He smiled so briefly that I thought it might be my imagination that he had. “He’s just a man. A powerful one, admittedly, and one who has somehow managed to control the wolves, and one who has somehow raised a small army of overseers to do whatever he wants.”
“We haven’t seen them in decades, not since—“ A nasty glance from Grave quieted all sound.
“What he means is we haven’t seen his kind before.”
“Right,” I said, puckering my lips slightly. “And so to finish up honesty hour, what the hell is my part in all this?” Turning away from Grave, I looked around the forest. Something wasn’t right, as though anything had been in as long as I could remember. But still, there was
Grave turned around brusquely. “You said you wanted answers, I gave you some. And now—“
There was no sound, at least not that I could hear. But for some reason, a sudden impossible tension squeezed my throat. It reminded me of a combination of pain, sadness and utter confusion, but without a word, I started unconsciously clutching at my throat. “What is…?”
“Hey! What the hell are you doing?” I heard Wild’s voice from behind me ,and then I heard Craze shouting too. Their voices were distant and echoing in the back of my brain. It felt like their words were bouncing around inside an empty room, sort of like the sounds I remember echoing back up the Grand Canyon when I was young.
I felt myself moving, but it wasn’t my body providing the motion. And suddenly, my thoughts drifted back to years before, back to that very same trip to the Canyon. I remembered my dad patting me one morning an hour before dawn to wake me up.
When I did, I wandered out of a tent, once again with the scent of strong cowboy coffee filling my nose. The rustling around me that the bears were doing was replaced in my imagination with the rustling of desert wind, cold and steady, and calming.
“Hey pup,” I remembered him saying. His voice was as clear as the stars above. “You doing all right? You look a little woozy. Altitude getting to you?”
“Must be,” I said in a voice I hadn’t had for at least fifteen years. The only way I knew that I was living in memory was that my voice was different. It’s a strange way to be, for sure, but somehow my brain was drowning out whatever was really happening. “The altitude,” I said with my little voice. “Sure, dad.”
“It’s all right, you know,” his voice was soft and caressing. There was an edge to it that I vaguely recognized as Grave’s, but as soon as it was there, it was gone again. “You’re all right. You won’t believe it now, but you are. Right now you feel like your whole world is a nightmare that you can’t control. Right now you think that you’re spinning and spinning, and you’ll end up dead before it makes any sense.”
I shook from the center of my being out to the tips of my fingers. “But how do you know?” I asked. I turned to face him, and realized that through the entire dream, I hadn’t once looked at my father, only listened to his voice. But when I turned to look into the green eyes that used to comfort me when I was sick and calm me when I was angry, his voice was behind me again.
“I just do, pup,” he said.
And then I realized in the way that brains tend to figure out in the aftermath of car crashes, or in the seconds after a person is shot and barely lives, that my father hadn’t ever said that to me.
“He never called me pup,” I whispered.
My voice was grown again, it wasn’t twelve year old Adriana I heard, it was ragged, tired, dirty, post-thirty Adriana.
And my head ached, and my throat was sore, and someone had me draped over his shoulder.
“Pup,” I said again, the ache in my head turning to nauseous dizziness. “No one’s ever called me that, I’m not… you’re not my… dad…” The words sounded frustratingly stupid as I spoke them, but nothing made sense. Somehow I was between two worlds, uncomfortably floundering in the space between reality and dream.
Or was it a nightmare?
“Where am I?” I asked. My voice was less hollow, but still didn’t feel like it was entirely inside my own skull. “What happened?”
“Hush,” Grave said. “Don’t move, I’m carrying you.”
My stomach ached. His hard, muscled shoulder was wedged under my ribs. “Craze?” I asked. “Wild?”
“I said be quiet,” the big bear said. “It doesn’t seem like it right now, but you’re fine. You’ll just have to trust me.”
“Trust you?” I tried to laugh, or snort, or hell, just take a deep breath. The air hitched in my throat and burned inside my lungs. I couldn’t breathe, and not because of the shoulder lodged in my midsection. “How… why?”
“Because you don’t have a choice.”
I tried to hit him, more out of angry frustration than because I thought it would do any good. I tried to scratch, I even tried to bite. The biting worked for a moment before he shook my teeth off his skin. “Why?” I asked again as I felt my consciousness begin to fade once again.
“Because, pup,” Grave said in a voice that calmed me and cooled my red-hot nerves in a way that I hadn’t felt for almost twenty years, “I’m doing what I have to do. I don’t want to do it, but without this… without you, we’re lost. And then…”
I swear I heard him take a rushed breath through his nose. Half unconsciously, I flattened one of my hands on the small of his back and felt his warmth burn into my fingertips. “You were calling me pup?” I asked as the last strands of waking fell away from my face like hair dripping off my skin after a long bath. “But… why? You tried to kill me… you… left?”
“I’d never leave,” I heard him say. “I only did what I had
to do for the clan.”
He paused as he took a few steps up something, and then down the other side. I couldn’t tell where we were or what was happening, but I could sense the change in elevation even as my mind waivered.
“But it’s not just them,” he finally said, although I couldn’t possibly say how long it had been since he fell silent. “And it’s not just the clan. Craze and Wild will understand when this is all over. But it isn’t for them either. And it isn’t for me.”
“Then,” I said, my voice once again distant. “Then who?”
“I’m doing this for you, pup. I’m doing this so that we can be together and we can be safe, but you just have to trust me. I know it’s hard, but you don’t have a choice.”
As though my mind was satisfied, that was it; the whole world swirled, and maybe a second, or maybe a minute later, it went black.
3
The fires never stopped burning in my mind. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I woke up, the distinct smell of smoking, charred pine filled my nose.
“Fires?” I asked, semi-coherent as my brain pulled itself out of the swamp of unconsciousness. “Are there fires?”
I knew it was Grave talking to me, holding me, as I arose, but I couldn’t hear anything but Todd. Every word out of my mate’s mouth seemed infused with the voice of my old boyfriend, the guy I’d learned had somehow romanced me—if you can call it that—for years, only to lure me into the woods for some reason I can’t understand. Hell, I don’t understand how all the pieces fit. Or at least, I didn’t, not then.
“No!” I cried out, shaking as I reached for Grave’s hair. I got a fistful and pulled him to me. “No, no, no more fires,” I whispered. I didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I felt that something deep in my soul was different; something deep down hurt so bad I could hardly keep back the tears. And if you know me, you know I’m not much of a crier.
“The fires are out,” Grave intoned.
