by Lynn Red
“Not exactly?”
“Jill, listen,” he began, standing up from the table and collecting his ever present coffee mug. She saw it was mostly empty, but he kept sipping at it anyway. “Some strange issues have arisen.”
“Yeah,” she shot back. “I can see that. We’ve got some Project Bluebook, Area-51, X-Files guys wanting to come along on a camping trip to see if we can videotape some bears and see if we can watch them hump each other?”
Fred laughed for a moment. “Well, that’s the hope anyway. But that’s not exactly what I was getting at. Those two are,” he paused and then waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about them. Just put them out of your mind, for now anyway. Understand?”
A brown curl fell down in front of Jill’s face, freed from her bun. She tucked it back behind her ear and squinted. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
“There’s a lot I’m not telling you,” Stanton said. “For good reason. The good reason is... I’m not even sure myself what’s going on. But for now, they’re gone, right?”
Jill sighed. “Yes, Fred, they are apparently not here anymore. So, why did you call me down here in the first place?”
“Were you busy?”
Jill frowned. Stanton didn’t bother to pursue that any further. “Sorry,” he said. “Look, the reason I needed you is because I need someone.”
“Oh God,” Jill said with a slightly mischievous grin. “Don’t get started with all that. You’ve got way too much energy for me, you old letch.”
Wiggling his gray eyebrows, the old scientist smiled. “Those, my dear, those were the days. Actually it is something like that, although not quite the same direction. I’ve got some bad news.”
“Don’t tell me, Fred,” Jill sat forward. “What’s wrong? I mean, do tell me, but what’s wrong?”
“Nothing serious,” he said. “I just have some slightly funny numbers on my physical. So I can’t go, not at first anyway.”
“You what?” she asked. “What do you mean, funny numbers?”
“Oh just old man bullshit, kid.” He saw the look on her face with the raised eyebrows. “No, I’m serious. My blood pressure’s a little high, heart rate a little high. I’m an old man, Jill. I’m not sturdy enough for treks into the woods anymore. At least not that anyone knows about,” he trailed off.
“Okay, all right, fine,” she said. “Won’t be the first time I went out in the woods by myself to go looking for a bunch of deadly animals. Oh wait, yeah this is exactly the first time.”
They sat in silence for a moment before one of Stanton’s patented grins spread across his face. “So that’s a yes? You’ll have a radio, and that pilot, whose name I’m always embarrassed to forget.”
Jill took a long, slow, deep breath. “Jacques,” she said with a vague smile. She and Jacques had dated for a few months after her last trek into the woods. That one was accompanied by an entire team, though.
“Right, Jacques. Nice guy, good pilot. And you’ll have a radio.”
“Oh good, a radio. Will there also be water for me to drink or am I supposed to rig up some kind of—”
The thing on her chest tinged again, cutting off her survivalist joke, and reminding her of the way that man in her fantasy touched her neck, how he trailed his fingertip down to her chest, and then vanished. She put her hand there, covering the birthmark with her palm. “Yeah,” she said. “As long as it’s temporary.”
“As soon as my numbers are right, I’ll be with you.”
He said more – a lot more – about preparations and first aid readiness and all sorts of other things, but Jill? She was a million miles away.
-2-
“When I sit and think, really sit and think, I usually need to take a break afterwards.”
-Rogue
Flicking his head to the left, and then immediately to the right, King sighed slowly. The whole clan was accounted for, except for the second alpha, who was... somewhere. He’d gone ranging days before.
From where he sat, in the only shade the noon-time sun afforded, the muscled alpha of the long-hidden Broken Pine Clan watched the few remaining cubs going about their daily chores. Some fished, some had gone into the forest for grazing, still others were practicing combat, which was a fancy way of saying “wrestling and hitting each other.” He ran his hand through his long, golden-brown hair and massaged his aching shoulder.
The cubs milled around below him, though their numbers dwindled dangerously. The clan had its two chiefs, its two alphas, in Rogue and King, but no queen.
“Slate!” King shouted as one of the adolescent werebears grew unruly and surprised his older brother with a sucker punch as the older one stood in a stream, waiting with a paw cocked in the air for a trout. “Let your brother hunt!”
“Yes, Alpha,” the smaller bear – so small he had yet to earn his tattoos – said, slinking back to the rest of the clan.
A smile crossed King’s bowed lips as he watched the younger cubs play, and the older ones hunt. One of the adolescent bears, called Arrow, sauntered into the middle of the makeshift camp and shrugged a sheet off his massive neck before shifting back into a lithe, long human. “Berries!” he announced. “Fresh, black and blues. I found a new clutch of bushes a half hour from here. I hope we can stay here awhile, at least until the berries are gone.” He looked in King’s direction.
The young bear had gotten his tattoos five years back, and was born with the mark of a Broken Pine alpha: one amber eye, to go along with his other one. He was the closest thing King and Rogue had to an heir, except another one had never been born. Tradition held that there were always two alphas, each with one amber eye, which made the clan whole. For King, the traditions and history of the clan were all that mattered.
For Rogue? Not so much.
“Get up, you old, fat bear! You’re going to sit there until you turn into a toad.”
Rogue mounted the last step into the alpha’s cave. Everywhere they camped, there was an overlooking space, just like this one. Behind them, the cave wound in a labyrinth, where they’d all sleep if the weather was bad, or there were lupines – the werewolves who had no order, they were just wild – making problems.
Oh, King thought. There he is, right on cue. Despite himself, the older – and not at all fat or in any way toad-like – bear, hopped to his knees and then his feet, and grabbed the second alpha by the forearm in a traditional greeting. For his part, Rogue insisted on a simple handshake followed by a hug afterwards.
For a few moments, the two alphas stared into each other’s eyes. Both of them had the Broken Pine alpha’s mark – one amber eye, and one of a different color. Rogue’s was dark blue, the color of a stormy ocean. King’s bright, burning green. Both of them were enormously tall, although King was slightly taller. But what he lacked in height, Rogue made up for in raw power. The muscles of his shoulders and neck flexed with every move he made. His chest tightened and relaxed with every breath he took.
The other thing? They saw the world in a completely different way.
King celebrated the old, Rogue the new; King treasured the memories he held of past times, and Rogue found them dusty and useless to the point of endangering the future of the clan. From King’s perspective, the only thing keeping the clan together and alive was tradition. Once that was gone, there’d be nothing left.
The generation before King and Rogue took over was a normal one. As normal as all those before, for as long as the clan had a history, either written or otherwise. But then tragedy struck. The women were taken by some shadowy force that never quite made sense. They swept in with their helicopters, like cowardly thieves in the night, and took everyone they could.
Bears had shifted, had fought like hell itself unleashed, but in the end, the strange humans in their slick black suits, with their electrified nets and shock sticks and relentless numbers, won out. That all happened only months after Rogue and King were named successor alphas. They knew from the start that their road would b
e a hard one.
Rogue’s way was to embrace change. King’s was to hunker down.
King shook his massive head, bringing himself back to reality. “How was the ranging? Anything to worry about?”
Rogue laughed, curling the left corner of his mouth in a mischievous smirk. “There’s always something to worry about, King. But right now, things are at peace. Although, while I was out in the wild world of the mountains, I thought about something.”
“You didn’t go into one of those human towns and drink them dry again, did you?” King smiled as he asked. He already knew the answer.
“No, of course not. Not completely dry, anyway. But when I was most of the way through their supply Fat Tire, a thought occurred to me, and I might be stupid, but—”
King snorted a laugh. “You were eating tires?” Rogue grinned, and sighed. “It’s beer. It’s delicious.”
“They make beer out of tires? Why would anyone drink that?”
Rogue heaved a heavy sigh. “As I was saying, there is a whole hell of a lot of country out there. Why do we have to stay here?”
“The clan’s rites, Rogue,” King said with a sigh. “You know this. We’ve been over it before. We’ve been over it as many times as you’ve gone ranging and gotten drunk.”
Rogue shook his head. “This time it wasn’t like that. The craft beers, you know, they have this sort of heaviness to them. You can’t drink as many as you can of the other things. Fills me up and makes me feel bloated and confused the next morning.”
A very patient look passed over King’s face. “And?”
“And,” the younger alpha – but only by a couple of years – said excitedly, “there’s no reason we can’t go out into the world, either pack up the clan and go somewhere else, or,” he trailed off.
A deep breath filled the older alpha’s bare, tattooed chest. The beads around his throat tightened as the muscles of his neck swelled slightly, and then relaxed. “The rituals, Rogue. They’re—”
“They’re useless ideas,” Rogue interjected, twisting his black hair into a knot and binding it with a length of string. “They’re keeping us in a place where we have no future. None of them do anything, anyway. We could prance around naked for hours, baking in the sun, and it wouldn’t make our mates return. But if we go out? If we look?”
“Then we die,” King shot back. “We’re so few, if ever we are found by whatever that shadow agency was that took our mates? If ever we settle, what happens then? We’re just sitting and waiting to be found, and once we are? What is it you think will happen?”
Rogue looked down at the ground, grinding the toe of a boot into the sidewall of the cave, leaving a white scratch. “I think we can’t keep running forever,” Rogue said. “I think our pack is already dying, I—”
“Clan,” King said.
“Ugh, clan, pack, what’s the difference?”
“Packs are for wolves. They’re savage and wild. Clans have tattoos, we have traditions.”
Rogue threw his hands up in the air, exasperated. “Traditions! Listen to this!”
“You’re hung over, Rogue,” King said, trying to bait the other alpha into anger. “You’re not thinking straight.”
Rogue narrowed his eyes to slits, his rage boiling over. Before long, hair would start coming out of his pores. “First of all I’m not hung over. Second? The clan, pack, whatever, is dying, and all your traditions haven’t done a fucking thing!”
King, reacting to some unseen force, touched the mark on his chest, and Rogue felt the twinge of heat as well. Both of them froze. “You too?” King asked.
Rogue nodded.
Of all the traditions and folkways of the clan, the mark was the only one Rogue believed in, and that was only because he could see it, and feel it, and didn’t actually have to do much believing.
“What is it?” Rogue asked. “Why is this happening so often these days? You don’t think...”
King gave him a glance that even the slightly wilder bear could read. The two turned, looking out of the mouth of the cave, down at the cubs who were silently staring at them. Arrow was no longer gorging on his berries. Slate was no longer trying to figure out a way to sucker punch his brother.
“Why do they always listen to us?” Rogue asked out the side of his mouth as a storm cloud gathered on the horizon.
“Because you always yell,” King said, a slight smile crossing his lips.
Rogue grunted and couldn’t help smiling too. “I only yell when I have good points to make.”
King gave him a sidelong glance as the two alphas moved to the mouth of their cave. “Welcome your alpha home, cubs,” King said with a booming voice. “He reports there’s nothing on the horizon. For now, we stay. Tonight we eat and drink and dance.”
A general cheer passed through the camp, but before long, the youthful bears all returned to their different activities. For a long moment, the co-alphas watched the clan going about their business.
All boys, all too young for tattoos except for Arrow and his slightly younger, and un-marked brother, River, who was named for all the time he spent standing in the water, catching fish with his bare hands.
Rogue clenched his jaws and swallowed hard. “We have to do something.”
They were both thinking the same thing.
“But what?” King asked. “If we stop running, we die. If we keep running, we—”
“Take slightly longer to die, and it just happens when we’re old and useless instead of young and strong and able to,” he trailed off.
“No,” King said, shaking his head. “We’re not fighting again. Not now, not ever. Fighting is what got us into this in the first place.”
“If we’d laid down when the men in black came, we’d all be gone. Dead, just like the others.”
“They’re not dead,” King said.
“Right,” the other alpha answered. “They’re either dead, or worse. Experimented on? Fiddled with? Rooted around in? Would you rather have that than our freedom?”
The words hit home, and hard. King sucked his bottom lip into his mouth and dragged his teeth along the auburn stubble. He didn’t respond, instead just watching out over the clearing, staring at the youths, none of whom were his by blood.
Afternoon’s burning, sweltering yellow sun dipped low behind the mountains and shifted slowly into the warm, hypnotic orange of early evening. As it did, the two alphas watched the cubs prepare camp, and begin to cook the evening meal.
Today’s had a lot of berries.
A lot.
Finally, after what felt to both men like hours of silence, Rogue spoke. “The winds are changing, brother,” he said. The alphas called each other brother by tradition – that was the one Rogue didn’t mind sticking to – not because of any relation. They were brothers in clan leadership, and brothers in war, friendship, and everything else except blood. “I haven’t felt my mark twitch like that since, well, I don’t remember the last time.”
King listened and then turned his face back to overlooking the camp. He spoke in slow, deliberate words, his voice a low rumble in his mighty chest. “I know,” he said simply. “It was before they were taken. But I don’t know what it means. Could it be that someone has gotten free and made their way back home?”
“Don’t get my hopes up,” Rogue said, kicking a rock that bounced down the face of the short cliff outside the cave. “It isn’t possible. Elsa, and all the rest of them, they’re gone. It’s time we move on.”
Elsa was their mate. Clan bears mated for life, and alphas were always two for each mate. It was so that no one knew which of the bloodlines bore children, and so bloodlines mattered less than clan.
Then again, Rogue had always been slightly irritated about that, too.
“Then what was it? You’re so sure you know the world, so tell me, brother, why did our alpha’s marks start burning and our muscles start clenching and our skin go prickly? What happened, if not a mate coming near?”
Rogue took a deep brea
th and popped one of the bursting-with-juice blackberries Arrow had brought them shortly after his return into his mouth. He chewed, sweet and tart fruit bursting between his teeth as he did. “You should try one,” he said, offering a handful to his sworn brother, who took a few and ate them all at once.
“Will you leave again?” King asked. “Or stay this time?”
Looking over at the older alpha with the slight tinge of gray in his auburn hair, Rogue opened his mouth to answer, and then reconsidered momentarily. “What is it?” King asked.
“I have to go. I have to search, to keep looking. You’re the leader, we both know that.”
“But you’re the fighter,” King said, nodding slowly. “You’re the last brave.” He shrugged. “That’s worth more than a leader who sits around and does nothing but take the clan from place to place every so often. Even if you won’t keep the traditions.”
“I have to look for her,” Rogue said, surprising King. “If someone is out there that we both felt, then she’s real. We have to find out who it is, and take her away from danger. Keep her from the men in black. If she got away from them,” he gritted his teeth. “If she escaped, then they’ll be tracking her. If she’s somehow another?”
“Another?” King asked, arching an eyebrow.
“We’re not the only ones of our kind. You know that. We could easily feel someone else wandering into our territory. Someone fated for us, somehow.”
King laughed bitterly. “I’m sure that’s it. A thousand years, maybe more, of us surviving in these woods alone, barely keeping ourselves alive, running and running until there was nowhere left to run. And finally one of the other clans finally comes into contact with us. Face it brother, we don’t know if the other clans even exist, at least outside of folktales.”
The irony wasn’t lost on Rogue. “So it seems I’m not the one talking shit about the traditions now, huh?”
King shrugged, and resumed looking out over the camp. “They have no idea what’s coming, brother. They just play and hunt and go on living life.”
