by Lynn Red
She knew better. Maybe it was the training she had, maybe it was the six years in girl scouts and two long summers at camp? Then again her time in the Girl Scouts was more about cookie selling competitions and the summer camp experience was more about finding a place to sneak off with a boy – or in Jill’s case – figure out how to avoid them out of abject fear that one might actually like her.
Or maybe she’d picked up the massive majority of her survival skills by watching Survivorman marathons on the Discovery channel when she sat around most of a Saturday with a hangover and nothing better to do.
Well, she thought, at least those hangovers ended up being good for something.
Jill unpacked her rucksack and threw her tent up with surprising rapidity. She wondered about her two bears, about where they’d gone and about why the wolves had stopped howling, but those thoughts only entertained her while she was engaged in other things. The night was almost hauntingly still, not much wind to speak of, no hint of rain on the air, and no—
Thrump-thrump-thrump.
Again? What the hell is this helicopter doing?
The canopy she’d picked for rain cover, should any appear in the middle of the night, also doubled to keep her safe from prying eyes – whoever’s they were. But still, she heard the blades, heard the wind, and she knew whoever it was in the unmarked chopper was out there, watching, waiting, for whatever it was they wanted to happen.
Jill couldn’t imagine what it was, but then again, she wasn’t entirely sure how she’d just come into believing that werebears were a real thing, either. Of course, shooting a werewolf right in the middle of the chest helped to foster faith. Jill let out a scoffed laugh and looked up. Briefly, she considered staying with no fire, but a chill was creeping in. And anyway, that guy had already seen her at least once. A shock jolted her when she remembered those cold, gray eyes, the lined, expressionless face. He’d made no motion of acknowledging her except the narrowing of those slate eyes.
Jill’s thoughts turned back to Rogue, to King. To how she was right all along. It was all so ridiculous, so unbelievable, that after all the years she spent being made fun of, harassed. How long had it been that she pretended not to think the things she did? Hell, the only one she’d ever told since she started her latest job was Fred – who turned out to be the only one she could call a friend.
Funny how everything works out, huh? How one thing leads to another?
And then, like always, her mark started to tingle. Seconds later, so did her stomach. The butterflies were back, the swirling, almost giddy wiggling that made her feel the same way she did when she first got Fred’s job offer – one she never thought she’d see.
Defiantly, Jill sparked her flint, directly into a pile of frayed twig tinder she’d been scraping off a handful of sticks. The fluffy poof of wood took the spark and smoldered. Cupping it in her hands, she blew gently to keep the ember alive, and laid it down gently in the circle of stones she’d built up.
As the ember turned to flame, she felt a pang in her chest. The mark was burning, distinct from the tingling she felt when one of her mates was around, either bodily or in spirit. This was a pain, a desperate, yearning pain. It wasn’t long – maybe a couple of seconds – after the burning in her chest that she realized it wasn’t indigestion.
The helicopter was gone.
Somewhere else, it was distant, she could hear it, but it wasn’t overhead anymore.
She stood, a sense of purpose, a sense of desperately needing to be able to see the sky taking her. She didn’t understand it, but had learned to follow her instincts lately. They seemed not to lead her astray very often these days. With the orange light from her fire burning proudly behind her, Jill took two steps before going back for her pistol, then treading carefully into the clearing about a hundred yards to the west from her campsite.
“The night is dark and full of... well, stars and trees,” she said, sighing out loud.
She wasn’t sure what she expected to find, but the still night was completely dead. Too dead. Way, way too dead.
Not even the owls were hooting, those huge birds that had been her constant companions every night, every morning, since she’d appeared in these woods. There were no bats gently circling. There was just... nothing. No frogs, no crickets. Dead silence wasn’t something that happened in forests.
“Unless,” she trailed off, squinting at the sky. “Unless the silence isn’t actually silent.”
When she focused her attention, she could barely make out gentle whoosh sounds from above. Those stars sure did seem close, she realized, and they were also moving a whole lot more than stars should move. She tried to count, but there were too many. She’d heard of these things before – who hasn’t heard of black helicopters, silently tracking whatever they track? But seriously?
Seriously?
In her mind, she started tying strings between index cards nailed to an imaginary board. The guys at the grant meeting, who had been so strangely insistent about having her report to them, men whose names had turned out to be fake. The werewolf frenzy that her two bears had no explanation for? The unmarked helicopter? And now, a fleet of silently flying aircraft?
“Jesus,” she said, eyes wide in shocked surprise.
It was hard to call the things above helicopters, since they defied all definitions of the normal giant, noisy things she was used to seeing. But that’s what they were, there was no denying reality, not anymore.
“But what the hell do you want? What the hell—“
A ripping, exploding sound partway between a gunshot and a sonic boom split the night. Right after, a warbling, siren-like sound emanated from somewhere overhead in a frequency that did something inside Jill’s brain. A shockwave of pain at the intensity of the sound made Jill clutch her ears, squeezing the sides of her head to try and drown out the sound, but it was no good.
The longer the throbbing, thrumming, high-then-low sound went on, the worse it hurt until she finally fell to her knees, tears running down the sides of her face in hot streaks. She opened her mouth to scream, and maybe she did actually let out a pained shriek, but she couldn’t hear it over the other horrible, brain-scraping sound.
But then a split-second later, all she could hear was her own screaming.
The ache was gone, the pain in her mind banished immediately.
Her mark burned hotter than before. She clutched her chest, clawing at the ember under her skin.
In the distance – but not too great a distance – wolves howled as though they’d just been awakened from some kind of hibernation. The calls were desperate, angry. Scared? She thought. Why would they—
Bang!
That sound wasn’t a mystery. That one wasn’t followed by some unearthly siren.
That one was just a gun.
A really big one.
-13-
“The only thing that matters to me is that I know you’re riding straight. Go against me, call me a liar, but never, ever try to fool me.”
-Draven
“King!”
Rogue shouted as his brother roared in pain and fell to the ground. They’d been watching the lupines from opposite positions as the wolves slept in their strange trance, apparently dead to the world. Since the latest frenzy, all the wolves had been unconscious, as though the sudden burst of activity was enough exercise for a month.
Or, he realized, as soon as the bizarre noise from the sky had sounded, and woke them all up, that they were being controlled.
He smelled the air, trying to catch his brother’s scent above the others. He caught the copper and iron, metallic smell of blood, and wished that he’d paid more attention when the older alpha talked about positions.
He shook his head, clearing the momentary guilt, and followed the scent. They weren’t far away in distance, but he’d have to keep to the perimeter of the wolf den to avoid being caught out in the open, alone, by a frenzied pack of lupines. Right then? That was something he could not deal with.
> “Here,” he heard, a voice calling weakly. “Rogue, I’m...”
“I’ve got you,” Rogue whispered, “you’re all right. Were you shot?”
King shook his head. “I’m not sure, I was just here, and then something hit me. This,” he held something in trembling fingers out to Rogue. “I don’t...”
“A dart?” his brother asked, taking the large metal cylinder. “These things aren’t supposed to do this. They must’ve missed.”
A massive hole was torn through the bigger bear’s thigh. He clutched it, but the blood still came.
“You ever feel like maybe you shoulda stayed home?” Rogue ripped his brother’s loincloth, pressing it into the wound to stop the bleeding.
“You and your jokes,” King said with a pained sigh. “Aren’t you ever serious?”
“Not at times like this. Squeeze my hand,” Rogue said. “This is going to hurt.”
King gritted his teeth, as the throbbing in his leg deepened. “I don’t need to... Ah!”
When Rogue tightened the makeshift tourniquet, King gave up the tough act and crushed the second alpha’s hand. “What are you doing to me?” he demanded, his voice almost comically high pitched, especially for King.
“Saving your life, you idiot. You’re welcome.” A rough grin crept across his stubbled, dirt-covered face.
King’s response was a long, low groan. “I would’ve healed without this barbaric human attempt at a cure.”
And it was true, he would have. As long as whatever shot him wasn’t silver – which would cauterize and need to be cut back – for bears, time heals all wounds, a lot faster than it does for humans. “Right, but not before you went unconscious and ended up dinner for a bunch of panicked wolves.”
King grunted in the way he acknowledged realities he didn’t like, but couldn’t ignore. “We need to get back to the cubs. We have to make sure that—“
In the night sky, something lit up. An enormous fireball shot toward the heavens, very much like a meteor that came from earth instead of space. It came from exactly the worst direction it could. At exactly the same time, both Rogue and King said: “the camp.”
They exchanged a quick glance, and both crouched to the ground, beginning their shift.
Only, King’s didn’t go as planned. Fur crept from his muscled arms and thick legs, but that was all. Before his limbs grew, or his body changed form, he seemed stuck in mid-shift, like he was in stasis. With lurching, stumbling steps, he fell, picked himself up slowly and fell again. “I... can’t,” he groaned. “I don’t know why, but...”
Rogue clenched the dart in his half-bear fist. “I think I have an idea. Can you walk?”
Once again, King pushed himself to his feet, groaning in pain as he did. He was just about to fall again when Rogue caught him under the arms. “That answers that.” He slid his brother’s heft onto his back. “Can you hold on at least?”
King nodded. “I think so. It’s just my legs, they’re numb.” As soon as there was enough hair-turned-fur for him to grip, he did.
“Damn!” Rogue shouted. “I didn’t expect you to hold on that hard. If you yank my fur out you’re gonna be screwed.”
Something like a twisted laugh came from his half-bear snout in the seconds before he was fully turned.
With King on his back, Rogue turned toward home, toward where the fireball had split the sky, streaming orange light in sharp streaks across the sky. “Whatever this is, it’s almost over,” he said. “Whatever is happening, I—“
“My mark,” King groaned. “It’s burning, she’s, Jill—”
“I feel it too,” Rogue said. “One thing at a time.”
*
Jill watched the firestorm explode, and then she watched the flames die down, leaving behind massive, curling trails of white smoke, stark against the pitch black night. The helicopters had vanished so quickly she wasn’t sure if they had been actual memories or simple figments.
The fire though, that was certainly not her imagination.
When it burst, it was so close that she felt an aftershock of force, and then a wave of heat. For some reason, she knew that whatever it was, and whatever that gunshot was, were part of why her chest was presently aching so badly she thought it might’ve been a heart attack. She checked her pistol one more time. She knew they were there, she knew it was loaded, but seeing the bullets gave her a little shot of security. Jill felt herself almost unconsciously pulled toward the pillar of smoke. Why, she couldn’t say – but something called her. Something tugged her in that direction. But just like Rogue and King, no matter how crazy she felt, no matter how strange or unbelievable the whole thing was?
Somehow, it felt right.
Maybe that fate stuff? Maybe there’s something to it after all.
*
“Report.”
Ice cold, stony hazel eyes focused on a slightly nervous man who was thirty years younger. The younger man was trying to hide his nervousness. “Uh, yes, General Draven.”
“Just Draven,” he said. “On this job, there aren’t any generals. We’re not supposed to be here. Hell, we’re not supposed to exist.”
“Right, sir, sorry. There was a slight... miscalculation.”
“With the wolves?” Draven asked. He narrowed his eyes. Just the glance was enough to make sweat bead up on the younger man’s smooth brow. He wiped it away.
“No, the wolves, that all went off as planned. The frequency we had is right – they went right into a whipped up, crazed frenzy, just like we hoped.”
Draven grunted under his breath, then unwound his arms from where they were crossed behind his slim frame and steepled his fingers under his chin. “So then, what? The bears?”
A moment’s hesitation told him everything he needed to know. “What about the girl? Is that obnoxious scientist still in the picture?”
“That’s the other thing, sir. We had a bead on her – or you did, I mean – but then she vanished. By the time we called in the air strike, our coordinates were no good.”
“Then what was that explosion?” Draven narrowed his lips to a thin, unbroken line that matched the pencil-shaped mustache immediately above it.
The soldier shook his head. “I told them not to do it. I told them the coordinates were bad, but they,” he trailed off, eyes turning to the floor.
Draven was nodding – he had expected this double cross. His only anger was at himself for not acting sooner. “I had a feeling this was the plan all along, but of course thinking isn’t in my job description. If that’s what the corporation wanted, then that’s what they get.”
“It was the den.” The soldier’s voice hitched slightly in his throat. “They firebombed the shit out of it. It’s like they wanted to wipe it out, make sure there was no trace left behind. I thought they just wanted to catch a couple of them, a couple of wolves, and do some experiments, or—“
Draven grabbed the younger man’s shoulder. “The first thing you learn in this line of work is that you’re getting paid to follow orders. The sooner you stop thinking, the sooner you stop feeling, the easier it’ll be.”
He laughed bitterly. “That’s a lesson I should have learned a long time ago. The other one is that you can’t fight an army by yourself. I never learned that one either. But the girl’s still alive?”
“Must be. And I think they might have missed with the firebombs. None of the cubs were down there. I checked the heat signatures. Maybe it was just supposed to be a warning?”
“You can’t warn someone who doesn’t know you exist. What would the point be? If you ask me, they’re trying to get all three of them back there so they can catch them all at once. At least, that’s the only thing that comes to mind.”
Draven pulled an unfiltered Camel out of the packet that he kept in the breast pocket of his unmarked uniform. With a smooth, practiced motion, he flipped it into his mouth and struck his ancient Zippo, then shut it with a clink as he exhaled the first puff. “I think you had the right of it. They want t
o experiment, but they don’t want to bother experimenting on the young ones. Why bother? If you want to dick around with nature, why not take the biggest and the strongest?”
“Yeah, I mean yes, sir,” the soldier said. Draven smiled. He hated the formality he was supposed to keep. He’d been a brilliant tactician, an incredible leader, but an absolutely horrible general. This life suited him much better, he thought.
“But what I can’t figure out, why did they want the girl?”
Draven shook his head. “If I could answer that, I would. Hell, I can’t even really tell you who is writing our paychecks. But then, that’s probably how they want it. There’s something strange about her, though. When I was watching her earlier, she didn’t show one shred of fear. She just stared straight back at me, like there was a purpose to what she was doing. And she kept touching her chest. Maybe a habit, maybe a tic, or—“
“It ain’t a tic, Draven,” a big, muscled-up bald man, heavily tattooed on the neck and shoulders, entered the makeshift office and closed the door behind him.
The grizzled old man took a long drag, held it for a second, and then blew out a huge plume of smoke as he turned to the door. “Rogue and King,” the new man said. “They don’t know what they’ve got themselves into.”
“Good to see you, Madix. I was afraid you’d decided to take your freedom and run with it.”
The cryptic comment made no sense to the young man, but he stood still all the same, his expression never changing. If there was one thing he’d learned about being a mercenary, it’s that you don’t show any emotions until you know someone’s entire game.
“No, sir,” the massive brute said. “Wouldn’t know where to go. And besides, I owe you one. Like I was saying, Rogue and King have no idea what they’re up against. They think the wolves are just frenzied because it’s that time of year, or month, or whatever. Also, I missed him on purpose.”
“Missed him? What are you talking about?”
Madix huffed a laugh. “Those black suits, they wanted me to tranquilize one bear so the other would be easier to catch. The point was – you had it right, junior – that the fire was supposed to lure them home. And to lure that girl in as well. She feels them, you know. She’s one of them.”
