by Lynn Red
The glare that Todd gave me was half confused and half, well, I don’t want to say ‘hurt’ but it seemed an awful lot like it. So, being at least half competent in talking my way out of impossibly dangerous situations, I figured the best thing to do was just keep talking. “I dreamed of just being with you, Todd,” I said, “I dreamed of marrying you and having a couple kids and having the most normal life in the world. But now…”
He laughed cruelly and loud. His voice was mocking and nasty—something I’d gotten accustomed to, if I’m being honest—and it made me think immediately that the Todd I loved really had been just a fiction.
That is, if I’d ever actually loved him in the first place. But it wasn’t the time to start questioning everything unless I wanted to go completely insane. Of course, I’d gone completely insane about a month before but hey, what the hell, may as well stay positive, right?
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but as I did, the image on the screen that Todd still held in front of my face changed slightly. Two figures, accompanied by three others, moved into the image. They were fuzzy, and indistinct, but something about them was familiar. They way they kind of loped around as they walked, the way they were swinging their arms like something out of a bigfoot video… “Craze?” I said, accidentally out loud.
“What?” Todd snapped. “Did you just—“
“No,” I said, “no, I was saying how crazy it was you picked me out of everyone you could have decided to latch onto.”
The lie came easily enough and the question was what I’d been wondering, but I was pretty impressed with myself and how I shit that out so effortlessly. “Yeah,” I added, more to myself than anyone else, “yeah, that’s what I meant. Nothing else.”
I took a quick glance toward Grave, who I noticed had climbed to his feet sometime in the last few seconds. He hadn’t started straining his chains yet, but I had the feeling that when he did, things were gonna get real, and they were gonna get real fast. With visions of every action movie I’d ever seen dancing in front of my eyes, I swallowed hard. The fantasies of my other two mates and whoever the other three they’d brought along bursting violently into the compound, or building, or whatever it was that held us were hard to try and push out of my mind, but I had to.
“So, uh, why?” I asked again.
With a snarl, Todd snapped his hand back, and for a moment I thought he’d notice how the image of the fires blazing all around us had changed ever so slightly, but instead he just stuffed the monitor into the arms of a passing overseer. “Take this to the headquarters,” he said. “Don’t be slow or I’ll turn the tendons in your neck into guitar strings.”
The shambling monstrosity looked at him through narrowed eyes, grunted, and then went on its way. This one seemed like he was at least forty percent human, though his head was vaguely buffalo shaped. I made a mental note to stop thinking too much about them, but when they all look totally different, it’s pretty damn hard.
“Look at the big picture, Ade,” Todd said. The more wolf-like he became, the more his voice took on a glassy, almost ghost-like quality. It was whispery and windy, like the sound of breeze blowing through a window screen. His face was more or less like it’d always been, but just a little longer, a little paler, and without the standard dusting of five o’clock shadow he always had. His eyes were more sunken, his lips thinner. Contrasted with the pale white of his skin, they looked almost like skinny earthworms slithering along his face.
“I picked you because I liked you, in the base, ugly way that humans like one another.”
Grave growled, and I felt myself shudder. “You mean you liked how I looked?”
“I guess you could say that. Regardless, I would’ve set up whoever I picked. This has been my plan all along, you know, to convince these savage bears they have a magical mate that’ll fix all their problems, right before I pull the rug out from under them like a cheap stage magician.”
“So it was all luck? Just random choice?” I was starting to get huffy despite myself. “So it didn’t matter who you picked? There’s nothing special about me at all?”
I felt my nostrils flaring angrily with each breath. He was smiling that ugly, sardonic, wretched grin he always wore. “Answer me,” I growled, feeling more and more like one of my bears with each passing second.
“Or what?” he asked, still with that goddamn grin on his horrible face. “What will you do, helpless little Adriana? Sic your bears on me?” He turned toward Grave’s cage. “This one had so much promise. I thought maybe he had more sense than the others, that maybe he had enough vision to look past his lust and his thirst for mating. I thought maybe he’d be the one to come up with an actual solution to all this.”
There was some kind of noise, like the beginning of activity that was starting to ramp upward and out of control, coming from some place in the distance. I couldn’t tell where the noises were coming from, but it seemed like they were sounds of conflict, of fighting. Suddenly, it was really, really hard not to start daydreaming about Craze and Wild ripping through an entire building full of monsters, saving the two of us and then taking me back to the cave for… well, uh, just taking me back to the cave.
Todd didn’t seem to notice. It didn’t surprise me much, since our last reunion he’d been very little but aggressive, nasty, and unpleasantly addicted to his own evil bullshit. It didn’t take long for the short burst of sound to grow into a cacophony of roars, yelps, hisses and growls.
“You’re making a dire mistake,” Grave said. I looked in his direction and saw that his face had gotten a little longer, his hair a little shaggier. Something was about to happen, and I couldn’t help but think that no matter what it was, it was going to be real messy. “Let us go and nothing will happen. We’ll go back to the way things have always been.”
“You mean between my wolves and you simple bears?” Todd laughed again. “Not a chance in hell. Anyway, you think I’m afraid of a handful of you idiots trying to barge into my compound and wreak havoc? Do you really think that has any chance of succeeding?”
“So you know they’re here right now?” I decided to play the last card up my sleeve. “And they won’t leave without us?”
He started laughing again. The thunder of his black-hearted storm raged on and on and on. “That’s not really the question,” he said. “Did you think I didn’t know they’d show up and try to play heroes? Did you really think I, of all people, didn’t plan for this exact thing? Really?”
Grave’s chains started to rattle and a moment later, I heard stones crack and then he hit the bars. “You have me to answer to!” he was only half transformed, but he was still a head and a half taller than Todd and so pissed off he probably could have ripped the arms off a Wookie.
But of course, Todd just started laughing again, even as the sound of metal bending filled my ears. He just kept laughing and laughing, but he had no idea who he was dealing with. He strode confidently to the front of Grave’s prison, and stuck a hand far enough through the bars that when Grave snapped and lunged, Todd yanked his hand back and clicked his teeth derisively. “Really?” he was laughing again. Of course he was laughing. He didn’t seem able to do much anything else.
The sounds from elsewhere in the building were growing louder by the second. “What’s all that racket?” I finally asked, a mixture of anticipation, excitement and trepidation mixed up in my stomach.
Todd stuck his fingers back through Grave’s cage, waggling them in his face as he spoke. “Oh I expect it’s a rescue attempt. If nothing else you can always count on bears to be stupidly brazen in their attempt at heroics. I appreciate their eagerness and their attempts at bravery but there is too much important at stake here to allow their interference.”
He sounded confident, but there was just a little twist in the way he spoke that gave away more than he meant to give. I doubt anyone would ever have caught it if they hadn’t spent years listening to a person talk, but to me, it was clear as day.
&nbs
p; That little twist in his voice?
Fear.
Todd, the alien-looking, half-wolf creature who stood before me, was afraid. Of what, I wasn’t sure, but there were two really good things to be really damn scared of making a hell of a lot of noise. He smiled as a bead of sweat ran down his clean-shaven scalp. “Why’d you shave?” I asked. “You had such nice hair.”
“Artifice,” he hissed, drawing out the last syllable in a grotesque trail of sound. “Like everything else humans do, it—“
His head snapped around as the sound of twisting, screeching metal blasted through the building. Soon after, the stench of burning fur hit my nose and I wretched over. My shackled wrists ached, my sides burned from injuries I didn’t even know I had, but the feeling of hope was almost overwhelming. Whatever was happening, it was something, and that’s all I had to go on, so it had to be enough.
“By the way,” Todd said as he turned away, “I saw your performance. If you weren’t so achingly stupid, you might’ve been a hell of an actress. As it is, you’ll die in a cage, surrounded by mongrel beasts. I can’t decide if that’s fitting, or sad, or something in between.”
“You’re scared,” I said flatly. “I see you sweating, I hear the way you twist your words just a little. I know you’re scared but you won’t admit it. You never would. You never could tell me how you felt about anything that wasn’t a joke, or you getting pissed off. I deserved better than you and now I have it.”
There was no laughter that time. He drew close to my bars, stuck his face through the cage and sneered at me. “You didn’t deserve anything,” he hissed. “You don’t deserve me, you don’t deserve them. Or… maybe you do,” he said. “Maybe you do deserve a mate who would sell you out without a second thought to take care of those he really cares about. Did he tell you the truth? Did he ever tell you anything?”
Just like that, I drew back and spit straight in that asshole’s face. I don’t know if it hit him, because I couldn’t see anything through the red rage that took me over completely. “You don’t know anything,” I screamed. “You don’t know anything about any of it!”
At the same time though, I couldn’t believe how right he was. Grave hadn’t told me anything, not until I cornered him and demanded it, and even when I did, he hardly gave me anything resembling real answers. I thought he might’ve been trying to make up some kind of bullshit deal, but I had no idea it had been like this, and I had no idea it had been with this… this… creature.
“Doesn’t matter,” Todd said. I could hear the sarcasm dripping off his tongue. “It never did. It never will. An hour from now you’ll be dead, and your idiot mates will have done it to you. I’ll think about you for a while, I’m sure I will. It would only be natural. But then I’ll forget. I’ll stop caring about you. I’m guessing the rest of the bears will too, if any of them survive.”
The roars were getting closer and Todd was getting more and more sweaty. I knew he was afraid, I knew what was coming, but the second the lights exploded inside the building, with a flash so powerful it blinded me momentarily and left my ears ringing, I wasn’t sure if my hopes of a rescue made any sense at all.
Chaos exploded as soon as my eyes returned to reality and the stench of burning fur, blood and pain, hit me all at once. I wanted nothing more than to be back in the arms of my mates, to feel safe and secure in our home, but at the same time… Todd told the truth.
Grave hadn’t said anything, he’d never come clean, and when he had, he spoke in half-truths that tended more to the side of lie than fact.
I looked in Grave’s direction, and found him staring at me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If we’re about to die, I can’t do it and not tell you.”
I closed my eyes, partly from the stinging smoke and the acrid taste of chewed Tylenol that flooded my senses. “That’s it?” I asked.
“No,” he said so softly that I could barely hear him over the chaos that grew ever closer. “I am sorry, but that’s not the most important thing.”
“Which is?” I spluttered a cough. “And it better be good.”
“I love you, Adriana,” he whispered. “I think I knew all along, but I needed to… I don’t know. I needed to make sure my heart wasn’t making another mistake. I don’t need an answer. I can’t expect that from you, not after what I’ve done. I just needed you to know.”
My response, even if I had one that was something other than just being dumbfounded, didn’t have a chance to come. I opened my mouth to say something, but even the thought hung up in the back of my brain. A cough interrupted whatever I was going to say, and then a half second later, I realized I wasn’t the only one gagging.
“Can’t… breathe,” I heard Grave splutter. He was back on his knees, his head hanging down low. He was fully human again, and from the way his shoulders sagged and his head hung like a giant pendulum between them, I knew he wasn’t just playing for sympathy. Something had happened, something terrible. “I can’t…”
“Grave?” I called out when he fell silent. “Grave! Answer me! Hold your breath!”
A wheeze came from his direction, followed by coughs that were harsh enough to bring blood. He took a deep breath that rattled when his lungs reached capacity, and his next cough was so weak that I thought he’d died and it was just the last air rushing out of his lungs. The following wheeze was so pitiful, so insipid and pained, and all I could do was listen helplessly.
“Please,” I said to myself in a hushed whisper. “I’d give anything if someone found us before it was too late.”
I didn’t know who I was asking for help. It’s just one of those moments when there’s nothing you can possibly do. You’re so utterly helpless, so alone and so desperate, that putting on a sick act makes sense and when that fails, and a mate you can’t decide whether you love or hate is sucking on what must be his dying breaths?
I opened my eyes again, hoping that my aimless prayer had been answered, but of course nothing happens like that. There was a haze, a thick, almost oozing, bubbling, haze rolling around my feet. He’d done exactly what he promised. At the first sign of danger, he ran, just like always. He never confronted anything more serious than a headache in his entire life without running one way or the other.
Of course, he’d never filled our house with toxic smoke after an argument, but looking back I started wondering if he’d considered it. I didn’t know who he was, that much had become very, very clear to me. I didn’t know the man I’d lived with for most of my adult life. I had no idea who the hell he was, or what he was more accurately. He was a question mark that I’d just started unraveling… and now poison smoke was pooling at my feet, and before I knew it, I’d be a dead woman.
Grave was still slumped over with his head hanging down between his knees. Luckily he was a big son of a bitch, otherwise his face would have been completely smothered already by the acrid smoke. As it was, he had a couple of inches left before it was really too late, but at the rate the place was filling up, it wasn’t gonna be more than a minute or two.
He coughed again, and moaned my name. I ached for him, I really did, but at the same time I couldn’t believe what had happened. I couldn’t believe what he’d done, and I couldn’t believe what he said to end it all.
Or maybe that wasn’t it at all.
Maybe I couldn’t believe that I’d fallen into everything so quickly, so easily, and hadn’t questioned him more.
But then again, what questions were going to get answers? And what choice did I really have, when it came down to it?
My skin began to tingle as the smoke swirled around my bare calves. As I stared into the morass, my thoughts swirled too, in completely predictable ways, fixated on completely predictable things.
“Ade?” a cracked, strained voice came through the smoke and the fire and the noise. “Grave?” A second voice joined the first and then called out for me a second later.
I arched my neck to try and see who it was, as though I needed to see where
it was coming from to know the mouth that formed the words. “Craze!” I would have screamed if my throat weren’t so raw. “Wild! We’re back here, we’re—“
“Trapped.”
Todd’s voice blasted through crackling loudspeakers. “But just to prove I’m not a monster…”
Seconds later, the shackles on my wrists clicked and fell open. I fell flat on my face, and pushed up out of the gas just in time to not fill my lungs with whatever the hell that caustic mess was made of. The cell clunked heavily a split second later, and before I could even come to my senses, I felt arms surround me, first two and then four.
“Why the hell are you here?” I asked, kissing Craze, then Wild, in between every word. I wanted more, I wanted them and I wanted to get Grave out of there and who knows, maybe even come to terms with him. “You came all the way here to get me, and I guess him,” I said with accidental, although completely genuine irritation, “and now…”
“Not going exactly as we planned,” Craze said, as he brushed his fingertips against my cheek. He kissed me hard and deep a second later, pinning my head back against the hard, rough texture of the wall behind me. “I wish I could use these cuffs for something better than holding you prisoner,” he whispered with a soft chuckle.
“That’s cute,” Todd’s voice came through the crackling speakers again. “That’s all very nice and cute and I’m sure you’re going to have a big reunion and all that, but… you won’t live for the next hour. So I figure, what harm is there in opening the doors? These bears happily walked straight into my trap, and saved me a whole lot of trouble, so it’s the least I could do.”
We ran from one end of the building to the other, banging, slamming, and hitting everything we could find. There had to be a way out. There just had to be. After all, if there was a way into the place, there had to be a way out, right? That’s just how buildings work. Doors, even if they don’t open both ways, can certainly be smashed in. So even if they don’t work both ways, they sort of do.
“I found something!” Craze shouted from the end of the hallway that lay in front of my former cell. Grave, for his part, was still slumped over in his cage. “It’s… hollow, I think,” he said. He banged again, letting me hear the hollow thud of his fist against the metal. “Can we get through?” he asked Wild. “I’m guessing our fearless leader’s going to need a hand out of this one?”
