by Lynn Red
I can’t explain exactly what was going through my head. I was still furious that he’d lied for so long, that he disappeared, and I was terrified as to what happened to Craze and Wild. Just having someone near me that I knew, whether or not I could trust him, was reassuring if nothing else. I opened my eyes, blinking as I expected sunlight to flood my vision, but the darkness was deep if not complete. “Where are we?”
Grave snorted a bitter laugh. “We’ve come a long way, that’s all I can say for sure. Here, eat this.”
Something warm and hard was pressed into my palm. It wasn’t until I touched what I recognized as a hunk of the hard tack that the bears always kept with them that my stomach started angrily grumbling. “How long have I been out?” I asked. “My stomach’s telling me it’s been a hell of a long time since I ate anything.”
I took a tentative bite, waiting for him to respond, when the swirling, nauseous, dizziness that I remembered from before when Craze and Wild vanished, began to churn in my guts. “What is this?” I asked. “Why do I feel like… before…” as I spoke, the reality of the situation sunk in deep and grabbed my guts in a tight fist. “You… you drugged me?”
It wasn’t an answer that came, but an arm around my shoulders. “Adriana,” he said, with a hint of something approaching regret in his voice. “Everything I said is the truth. Everything I told you about doing this for you and for everyone else, it’s true, but you have to trust me, you have to—“
“You drugged me!” I shouted, standing up on wobbling legs. The ground under my feet was as soft as my brain felt. My feet, bare and painful, squished into what felt like a mat of dead leaves and moss. “You drugged me and pulled me out here to God knows where and you’ve done… what the hell did you do to Craze and Wild? I thought they were your family? I thought I was your family!”
My voice had reached a fever pitch, and the little bit of whatever he’d used to knock me out had stopped working. My rage, starting to boil hot and true in my veins, had melted it away. And then, just like nothing had happened at all, Grave grabbed my other arm, pinning them both to my sides and holding me still like I was a child throwing a tantrum and he was keeping me under easy control.
“Calm down,” he said in that measured, obnoxiously peaceful voice that I’d grown to hate. “I told you they’re safe, and they are.”
“Did you drug them too?”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t have to. They see things my way, pup, they understand the reality we face, even if you don’t.”
He took a step backward, but still kept his grip locked on my arms. “Then again, how could you? How could I expect you to understand? Why do I keep doing this?”
I’d never heard him question himself. Hell, I’d never even heard him do anything except be dominant and commanding. Then again, we all have a point where we can’t move past. There’s always something we can’t break through. If I’ve learned anything in my life, that’s it.
“Doing what?” I asked, thinking that maybe I could work some info out of him if I kept prodding.
Instead he laughed. “Doing what, she asks. Doing this, pup! Why do I keep feeling the need to justify everything I do to a clan that hardly understands how they’re still alive, and worse still, to a mate who doesn’t know that she controls the fate of an entire people?” He shook his head violently, as though he was trying to clear his head. And then he started pounding on either side of it, each thump of his fists sending his hair in waves around his huge head.
“Enough!” he shouted. Turns out, I was wrong about him being calm being more frightening than him raging. A seven foot-some odd bear shouting? Real goddamn scary. “Enough,” he said again, rage bubbling behind his nearly whisper-quiet voice.
“Why are we fighting?” I asked him as I lay a hand on his shoulder, hoping that my touch would calm him as it had before. For the moment, at least, it seemed like it was working. “Why did you have to drug me? Why couldn’t you just bring us all where you wanted to bring us?”
“You wouldn’t come,” he said with certainty. “No amount of loyalty would drag you where we’re going.”
I drew my lips into a sarcastic smile. “And what makes you so sure of that, big guy? I think I’ve done a pretty good job of sticking with you three regardless of how ridiculous the situation. I fought wolves for you. And, hey, remember that time you put me in a cage and almost left me for dead?”
“You’d only have died if we did,” he said with his voice slightly down turned. “It didn’t happen. And remember, you took that blade you used to fight the wolves, and you stuck it in my throat. I’m not sure it’s up to you to wonder why we’re fighting.”
I bit my lip as hard as I squeezed the shaft of my axe-spear, which he’d for some reason never taken away. “Why’d you leave this?”
“Because you’ll need it where we’re going,” he said softly. “And partly because I might be a complete fool for trusting you, but I do .I can’t take you to him without at least giving you the chance to—“
He fell silent and ground his teeth together so hard I could hear the enamel scratching together. “You what?” I asked in a hiss. “You’re taking me to who? And why would it…”
And then it hit me. My heart sank straight into my acid-burbling stomach. Square in the face, like a locomotive with a fist on the front plowing into my sternum, the realization drove the air out of my lungs and would have shattered my ribs if it were a physical object. “You’re taking me to Todd, aren’t you? You’re giving me to him, aren’t you?”
I heard the grinding again. For a moment all I wanted to do was ram my blade straight through his stomach. Maybe then he’d feel as betrayed as I did. I didn’t think anything else could really sell it. But what would that accomplish? What would killing him do? I’d still be lost in the woods, alone and more or less helpless, without a clue in the world where I was.
“I can’t even get to him on my own,” I said, musing aloud. “I’m… what’s supposed to happen? Why does he want me? If this whole thing was his plan to get me into the woods, then why on earth do you have to take me to him?”
Grave shrugged, his huge shoulders lifting to his ears. “Put that down,” he said, turning his eyes toward the spear in my hand, which I dropped. “I couldn’t tell you what he wants, but my guess is that things are getting out of hand. Something with the wolves is going wrong, and he’s up against a wall. Then again, this could all be part of his plan, too. I just don’t know.”
“I’ve never heard you admit that before,” I said, suddenly feeling an almost inexplicable wave of sympathy for the enormous creature who seconds before I’d considered running through. “But why, Grave?” I pleaded. “Why this way, and why not—“
I heard it the same time he did, but he spoke first. “Overseers,” he said shortly and flatly as the snarling, yelping, tortured howl struck both our ears. “Get down, now!”
A hand shoved me into the dirt before I could get down myself, but thank goodness for it, because a split second later a ball of angry teeth, dirty fur and the smell I’d learned was Mange, flew over my head and straight into Grave’s cocked fist. The howls coming out of the wolf turned into blood-curdling screams of agony. I looked up just in time to see Grave grab the thing by the neck and wrench it with a decided crunch.
He threw it to the side, grabbed me under the arm and yanked me to my feet. “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said. “The fires, the smell, it hid their scent.”
“I guess now we know why they do it, aside from whatever it is they’re making.”
There was no time to keep ruminating on the possible causes or effects of the acrid smoke. Three more wolves were on us a half-breath later. Something hard and sharp struck my side. My muscles and bones flared hot, and the air I sucked through my nostrils burned as it went into my lungs. In one smooth motion I whipped the spear-axe off my back and drove it straight toward the source of the pain snaking through my ribs.
An electric jolt of adrenaline
coursed through me as the spear first crunched, then drove deep. A howl told me I got what I wanted, and a second later, the stink of wolf blood filled my nose. Grave grabbed for me again, his hand finding my wrist as he pulled me to his side. “We need to go,” he said.
“You keep saying that,” I answered in a desperate whisper. “I think you should plan better.”
“Huh, a joke,” Grave said grimly, and then for just a moment, smiled. “Maybe.”
The first flash of his old self, of the security and kindness I felt when he’d first clutched me against his chest, returned, but all too briefly.
The bellowing call of rage and poisonous hatred that I knew meant the presence of one of those bizarre, twisted abominations called overseers filled the forest. I let out my own version of a war cry, and unhooked the blade from my spear, starting to spin in a whirlwind that I hoped would rip straight into the wolf, or the overseer, or whatever was stupid enough to get near me. What grabbed me though wasn’t teeth or a claw, but when the arm clutched me, I knew who it was.
“You’re brave, pup,” he said in a way that reminded me of old, better times. “But this is crazy. Really, really crazy.”
“Isn’t that what we specialize in?” I asked, a snarl crawling over my split lip. “I mean, it’s not like most of our encounters are exactly normal.”
Grave grunted a laugh. He knelt to the ground, and unleashed a terrible roar that shook both me, and the trees all around us. His transformation was almost instantaneous. His shoulders moved, his arms thickened, and in the blink of an eye, a gunmetal gray bear stood on his hind legs, pounded his chest with enormous fist-claws, and gave me a short glance and a nod.
I can’t tell you how I knew. I doubt anyone really could explain away how their intuition told them that things were about to change in their lives for better or worse or something in between. When he gave me that look and that little tilt of his head though, deep down, my spirit flickered just a little. A tiny flare of something just as impossible as wolf speed and bear strength flared inside me. Maybe it was the mixture of the acrid smoke and the still fresh pine; possibly the stink of sweat and blood and the screams all around me. Who knows why these things happen?
They do though.
And when they do? You can either stand there in the way, staring at change and refusing it, or you can… roar.
I grabbed my axe-spear in a fist so tight my fingers squeaked over the shaft. My knuckles burned and ached with the tension. It all came so fast, so brutally, impossibly fast that I’m not entirely sure I was even in control of my motions. I just did what intuition told me to do.
Spinning left, turning right, slashing, jabbing, ripping, tearing; hours before I’d been ruminating over my ex-boyfriend and being sucked into a world I didn’t understand, but in those few explosive moments, none of that mattered. Hell, none of that even existed. Nothing did except me, a spear, and a giant gray bear fighting off hordes of mangy, scrawny, repulsive smelling wolves of every awful, dirty color imaginable.
When the action stopped for a brief moment, I looked over to Grave and saw he’d been cut, and badly. A rip went from his shoulder across his chest. Blood ran down his torso, soaking into the dense fur where his waist would be. When he looked in my direction again, his eyes were glassy, and his mouth hung grotesquely open.
It wasn’t that I loved him, although somewhere deep down, I know I did. It wasn’t even that I trusted him, not really. He drugged me, he left Craze and Wild to whatever fate he wouldn’t admit, but seeing him in such obvious pain lit some sort of fire in my belly. I went, in that instant, from just a woman in the woods to a den mother whose mate was being ravaged.
Three wolves charged him at once, and from the green fringes around the tiny shelter we’d stopped in, I heard the screams I knew were overseers. When they came, I was held completely enthralled for a split second. Each one of the three was slightly different, but all were just as horrible.
They looked like a cross between a bipedal, overgrown wolf, and something that came out of a 1950s horror movie. Their skin didn’t quite fit, and although it was obvious they were covered in fur, it was sparse and ugly, not even and smooth and beautiful like my bears. The thought occurred to me in that strange moment before trauma strikes at its worst that these creatures were somehow caught between wolf and man, eternally hanging in a limbo, and probably eternally tortured by it.
Somewhere in my lizard brain, I felt a twinge of sympathy for them. As they shambled, alternating between crooked running and limping, and constant angry screeching, I realized they didn’t know what was going on. They were puppets, just like the wolves.
But sympathy only lasts so long, especially when you’re dealing with things that could rip your head off without a second thought.
“Grave!” I shouted to him, over the roar surrounding us. “Can you fight?”
He turned toward me, with a wolf clamped in each of his paws. He threw them easily to the side, with less effort than it would take me to toss the unwanted bread heel at the end of a hoagie in the garbage. “Run,” he said in a ragged, torn voice.
That wasn’t what I expected to hear.
“I can’t,” he roared. His voice rattled painfully in his chest, telling me he had broken ribs or worse. “You have to get out… Craze and Wild… you have to get to them, to…”
It wasn’t him that got hit next. Sharp pain shot into my side as a whip wrapped around my wrist and yanked brutally. My spear went flying, and when I looked back, I saw that not only were overseers awful, they were also silent when they wanted to be. I grabbed the stiff, cracked leather, and pulled with all my might, but to no avail. The thing that stood near me was at least three feet taller than I stood, and looked to be twice as thick.
I looked back to Grave, who had shifted back to half-human, and was struggling to keep himself on his feet. One after another, wolves hurled themselves at him. He batted them away, but as I watched, the strength was draining from him with each passing second. The massive bear dropped first to a knee, and then into the dirt. His prone body hoisted up as he howled in pain, first onto the backs of wolves.
He reached for me as an overseer grabbed one of his legs and flung him onto one of the monster’s hunched shoulders, but as soon as he was in place, the lights went out of the bear’s eyes. He slumped against the beast, though I could see he was still breathing, it was just barely.
“Why?” I asked, knowing it was pointless, as the one that had caught me reeled me in. He pulled the whip hand over fist, like a fisherman reeling in his catch. The only thing I could think as the lights in my own eyes went out for the second time in far too short a period was that the first time, as much as I hated it, as much as I felt betrayed by a mate who was supposed to care for me?
The first time was a lot easier.
4
Cold steel bit into my wrists and as my eyes fluttered open, I twisted my fists instinctually against the restraints. Lifting my head as the remains of the stupor faded, I stared up into a light so brightly white that it burned into the back of my brain. My optic nerve flared angrily, and despite the whole terror surrounding and enveloping my every nerve. I sneezed so hard the ache in the back of my brain spread through the rest of my head.
“What the fuck?” I sat up with a start and lunged forward, only to be yanked backward. I fell, and my hips cracked hard against the cold stone underneath me. “What? Where am I?” I rattled my chains, shook them again and tried, stupidly, to pull.
“Stop,” a voice came from the darkness to my left, and I almost wrenched my neck trying to turn and see where it was coming from. I knew who it was, of course I did, and I’d know that voice anywhere. But just like having someone speak to you and have their voice come through the end of a nightmare through the mouth of the alien that had been chasing you in the dream, it didn’t seem real.
Soft footsteps approached, leather soles scraping against the gritty floor of what I had to assume was a cell, or a cage. I yanked the restr
aints again, until warmth ran down my hands. “I said stop,” he said in such a cold, unfeeling voice that it sent a shiver up my spine. From the other side of me, and much more distant, came rattling breaths and heavy, pained groans. “Or you’ll end up like him.”
“What did you do to him?” My voice strained my throat so badly I thought I’d end up spitting blood before long. And as long as I got to spit it in Todd’s face, I thought maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. “What the hell did you do to him?”
“Me?” A soft chuckle punctuated the chill. “Nothing. My wolves did all the damage, but you saw that, didn’t you? Or were you already out? Did you fall unconscious as quickly as you forgot about me?”
I shook my head, still blinded by the spotlight, as sweat ran down the sides of my face and soaked into what was left of my soiled, tattered shirt. “Why are you doing this?” I asked. “And what the hell do you mean forgot about you?”
I heard him begin to pace again. Footfalls slid away and then back toward me. I blinked the sweat out of my eyes, and managed to get back to my feet. I lifted my arms to try and shield my eyes, but the chain stopped me short. “So you didn’t just traipse off into the woods with a bunch of bears? You spent… how many days, how many weeks, trying to get back to me before you gave in?”
“You know that’s not what this is about,” I said with vitriol dripping off my tongue. “And don’t you start lying to me too. I know about you and all the wolves and taking over the clan’s territory.”
He laughed again, the sound echoing off the inside of my skull. “Oh you do, huh? From science teacher to warrior princess, right? You never questioned that maybe—just maybe—you ending up in the woods, rutting with a bunch of naked, sweating bear-men wasn’t reality?”
A coughing fit wracked me. I felt Todd step near. I smelled him in a way that a month ago, I never could have. It was almost like being in the woods, being with the bears, had turned my senses keener and stronger than they’d ever been. Todd had a slightly acrid smell to him, which reminded me of the smoke.
