by Lynn Red
He stuck out a hand, pulling Rogue to his feet. “Nephew,” he said, “if I wanted to kill you just then, I could have snapped your neck like a twig.”
Nephew? Jesus. Jill shook her head, reaching instinctively for King, who she found had relaxed some when her fingers wrapped around his lower forearm and it wasn’t bulged out and tight with strain. She worked her fingers in between his, and as soon as their palms touched, King’s shoulders sagged, slightly relaxed.
Rogue brushed himself off, and she reached for him too, taking his hand and having the same effect.
The world felt like it was moving through a river of syrup. Slowly, achingly slowly, everyone seemed to be realizing at once that no matter what fighting they did, no matter what wishing or hoping happened, there was one way out.
“I’m guessing you have a plan?” Rogue asked, sounding strong and confident despite what Jill knew was a heavy, pained, heart. He swept his head to the side, his gaze lingering on Jill for a second.
Draven nodded. “There’s a chopper waiting. GlasCorp thinks I’m patrolling for you, as you heard. My using it won’t seem strange. At least until we fly off their radar and I drop you off four hundred miles away and then try to get the hell out of here before I catch a load of silver buckshot in the face.”
Warmth crept from her chest to her belly, then eased around her sides. The look on Rogue’s face was different than it had been before. He wasn’t watching her with hungry lust, or a desperate need to feel her, inside and out. His one amber eye and his one deep blue were watching her and getting strength.
He squeezed her hand and closed his eyes for a moment. By the time he opened them, he had looked to the cubs, then to King. “Why are you helping us?” Rogue asked Draven, but not looking his way. “Why put yourself in danger?”
The old man laughed through his nose, the sort of laugh only a person who has seen the actual end of the world, and is listening to someone worry about something nowhere near it, can produce. It was dry, but not uncaring. It was just... tired. “I’ve done a lot of things that not many people understood. They were always for the clan, though. I just had a,” he paused, thinking over his words. “I had a peculiar way of going about them. I waited as long as I could. Waited until you had her.”
Draven’s icy eyes cooled the warmth in Jill’s chest, but again, they weren’t cruel or unfeeling. She could just feel his hard strength pulsing through her. What had they done to him? Hell, who was he? Why does he know who I am? She blinked away the questions. There would be another time for that, she knew, or at least hoped.
Just like before, his mention of Jill and waiting until the bears had her went without a mention. That syrupy feeling from earlier came back, except added to it was a fuzzy sort of detachment that settled over Jill’s mind.
The cubs began to move, Rogue and King dropped her hand. Rogue went in the front, King in the back. Jill found herself swallowed up into the midst of the cubs. One of them grabbed her hand while another couple of innocent-eyed bears grabbed a belt loop on her jeans, or stuck a finger in her pocket.
A few of the older ones still regarded her with cool looks, but even those older ones with the understandable skepticism, were standing closer to her. Whatever it was that Rogue and King felt, whatever safety or security or closeness they had to Jill obviously ran in the clan, because the further they went on their silent walk, the more tightly packed the cubs became.
The tighter they huddled the more hands that found their way into or onto some part of Jill’s anatomy. Some of the cubs just grabbed some part of her clothing and hung, some just watched her, and some needed to feel her skin, so they held a wrist or a finger or whatever they could find.
Once, when Rogue had looked back to see the growing clump of comforted bear cubs, he’d given her a brief smile – the first she’d seen since the firestorm. Probably the first time he’s smiled at all, forget ones that I’ve seen.
The moon was moving slowly across the sky, although in a few hours it would disappear into the pale blue of dawn. Every so often, Draven could be heard answering someone on his radio. Every time he made up some new story about a place he’d looked and found nothing. He said that maybe they had caught wind of the invasion and left. Bears, he’d said, tend to be a little more careful, and a little smarter, than people give them credit for. All that rage and anger has a use, he’d told whoever was on the other end of the transceiver. It’s never just because it feels good.
That part, maybe, she disagreed with. Just a little.
As she crunched over grass, twigs, dead things and even more live ones, she remembered being in Rogue’s arms, and then King’s and then both of them. When she was with one or the other of her alphas, it felt good – not good, she thought, unbelievable. Then again, when they were all together?
There wasn’t prose purple enough to describe that, although her brain tried to come up with some. What she finally settled on though, was a lot less fluttery and vague. Home, she thought. Safety, being where I belong. The place I’ve always tried to find... somehow, it found me.
Lulled into her gentle state of repose, she hardly heard the helicopter’s blades where it hovered like a massive, pregnant black and gunmetal gray hummingbird, before touching down. It was a military-style chopper with huge bay doors and plenty of room. It’d be a tight fit, but her mind was pulled in too many directions to make sense of it all.
Where are we going, anyway? She wondered. Not for the first time, and not for the last.
She barely noticed the pilot when he looked her direction and nodded slightly.
And then she barely noticed the fact that the man – she assumed he was a man anyway – helping the cubs on board jumped out of the bay door.
King ran to his side, looking absolutely shocked. “Madix?” she heard the alpha say. “You’re... you’re alive?”
Draven clapped the younger, thicker man on the shoulder. “He escaped. There’ll be time for all that later. Let’s get going.”
Jill saw something flash in the younger man’s hand, and then saw the smile he flashed. Whatever was in his hand glinted in the overhead light streaming out of the chopper. “I didn’t escape,” the man said through clenched teeth. “I was,” Jill watched him make a quick, sudden movement. She lunged forward, but a second too late. “Hired,” the huge, shaved-headed man hissed.
The thing in his hand – a knife, three inches long – he drove into Draven’s neck. The old bear’s jaw clenched tight. “Silver,” he hissed, “I...”
Jill rushed to his side, catching his surprisingly heavy body as he slumped to the ground. He clutched at the knife, tugging weakly. She helped, then used the blade to cut through a big swatch of his uniform shirt, holding it against the wound.
King and Rogue both dove at the twisted giant at once, fangs flying, fur rushing out of pores. The bald man unleashed a roar that shook Jill to her very core. Draven’s eyes fluttered, he opened his mouth and closed it, over and over.
“In about thirty seconds,” Madix snarled, “I’m gonna use that radio to call base and tell them there’s a chopper full of cubs, and three big morons – all dead – on their way to GlasCorp headquarters.”
“Like hell you are,” Rogue snapped, grabbing a handful of Madix’s fur. The bear just laughed. “You’re dead, pig-shit, and then we’re taking your chopper out of here.”
“Oh yeah?” Madix held out a hand. “I think they’ll notice this.”
The button clicked.
Jill – and her two alphas – saw the fireball, white-hot and blinding – before they heard the explosion, or felt the blast.
-16-
“Ain’t no fight like a bear fight.”
-Rogue
There was enough growling to fill a 1980s power ballad album.
Back and forth, the bears struggled, one pushing the other, the other pushing back. So far, a couple of brutal moments into the brawl, Rogue and King had managed to flank the inked up monster that stabbed Draven. Of course, from h
ow easily he was holding both of them back, maybe “flank” was the wrong term and “split up” was a better one.
Rogue snapped his jaws, which prompted Madix, who was half-shifted and very drooly, to bark a laugh that sounded like it hurt. Two quick slashes were turned with so much ease that twisted, monstrous bear with the metal caps on his teeth actually looked bored by fighting.
Draven had pushed himself to a sitting position, and Jill was still holding him, but by this time, he was more holding her and making sure she didn’t do anything crazy.
“Stay down, girl,” Draven hissed at her when she tried to make a move. “What the hell do you think you’re going to do against him?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Long tendrils of drool hung from Madix’s fangs, his eyes were wild and yellow and bloodshot. He looked for all the world like a science experiment gone wrong. That’s when it hit Jill right in the stomach. “Oh my God, what did they do to him?”
Draven shook his head as King took a backhanded paw that twisted his head around and sent him crashing to the dirt. “His teeth fell out. They had to make new ones. That’s how it was for all the bears, only he’s the survivor. The rest, their bodies rejected the,” he paused, swallowing hard. “Rejected the improvements.”
That word – improvements – was punctuated by Rogue getting a claw full of face, and tearing into Madix. The drool turned red until the monster shook his head, flinging it all over the place. Behind him, the pilot was shouting something, barking what sounded like orders or demands. Jill couldn’t hear what he was saying, but every time he made a noise, the bear reacted. There must’ve been something to that, she thought, but not before she winced as Rogue caught a knee to the stomach and then a claw to the face that opened a wound on his chest.
The smaller alpha roared in pain and braced himself against a tree before charging right back in.
“He’s going to kill them,” Jill said, open mouthed and panicking so badly that she couldn’t even panic right. She was just frozen in terror, watching the butchery. “There’s nothing they can do against him. Did the surgery or whatever, did it make him insane?”
“That’s one of the side effects,” Draven said. “I got an early version of the treatment back... twenty years now. All they gave me was a shot of some... some serum.” He took a moment to breathe. King took a shot to the chest so hard he flew backwards, slamming full against a tree trunk before collapsing to the dirt. “But now, that’s,” he trailed off, watching as the monster bear threw his head back, his skin so tight over the strange veins running up and down his chest that it looked like it was about to split.
“That’s how it is,” he finished, running his tongue around his lips. “Water?”
Without taking her eyes off the ensuing wreckage, Jill handed her canteen over to him.
It was a surreal kind of dance. Rogue and King going back and forth with the metal-toothed mutant bear. Behind them a helicopter hovered, inches off the ground, with some man in aviator sunglasses screeching words no one could understand – except for the mutant bear – and then there was Jill, sitting there, handing a canteen to a man she thought three days ago was out to kill her, or to kill the bears.
He pushed himself to his feet as the scuffle continued. The actual brutality came in short bursts – a shot here, a claw to the side there – but the tension never released. At any second, one of them could jump, and even as outmatched as Rogue and King were, they were still clever, strong as all hell, and had been together their entire lives.
Something to be said for knowing your partner. Or partners, I guess. King fell to another horrible looking claw swipe, tumbling to the dirt. But this time, when Madix dove on top – looking like he was about to do some real damage, Rogue jumped on his back, half-human claws ripping and tearing.
“Can’t you do something?” Jill hissed at Draven, who was fully to his feet, but shaky. “You’re some kind of super soldier too, huh? Can’t you help them?”
“I wish I could,” he said. As he did, he slumped to a knee, wheezing and holding his neck.
“That silver, that knife, it... it poisons us. Takes a while to get right again.”
The big bear threw Rogue off his back, screeching and growling, and flung him to the ground. Rogue let out a pitiful half-yelp, half-groan in the instant before his hand shot back up in the air, trembled, and fell to the ground.
This is bad.
For the first time since this began, neither of the alphas were getting up. King was coughing, probably with a few broken ribs which probably felt really good. Rogue wasn’t even moving, though his feet were starting to scratch at the dirt.
“Kill!” the pilot screamed.
Somehow, that was the first word Jill had heard, the first one that came at exactly the right moment when the blades were whooshing just right.
Rage shot through her. For them to go through so much, to come so far, and then to have it all end like this? Her hands were trembling as she charged the monster, completely oblivious to how stupid it was. If two giant bears couldn’t manage, what was a six foot human going to do?
But in that instant, it didn’t matter. She couldn’t sit back and watch her mates get mauled and murdered by an experiment gone wrong. It wasn’t even Madix’s fault, she thought, in those moments of clarity that come right before some horrifying, terrible climax. It was GlasCorp who took him, fiddled with nature, played God, and ended up with a monstrosity.
She pushed off the ground, howling a shriek that would have really scared the shit out of her cat, but was barely audible above the helicopter blades, and the screaming pilot, and the enraged chest thumping that Madix was enjoying.
Jill landed on him. His muscles, impossibly hard, and the blood pumping through his veins so close to the surface sickened her. Every inch of her body seemed to retch at once, as her fingernails dug into his shoulders. She opened her mouth, took a deep breath, and sank her teeth right into the bear’s massive neck.
“Jill!” she heard King shout. “No!” Rogue added, both of them struggling to their feet.
The world whipped this way and that. Air rushed around her, adrenaline pounding in Jill’s temples. Her blood boiled, the stench of the monster’s sweat filling her nostrils and somehow making her more angry, like he was emanating some kind of pheromone that made her want to kill.
Or, maybe, she just really wanted to kill this thing, save those cubs, and get back to California where she belonged, with the bears she belonged there with.
To her surprise, the big beast pitched around a little slower after a moment, whipping his arms around, slapping at himself trying to dislodge her. King and Rogue watched as their former clan-mate helplessly waved his arms like a tyrannosaurus trying to get rid of a hamster biting his neck.
The two of them exchanged a glance for a split second, which Jill only caught because she lifted her head to bite somewhere else. The taste was awful, the stench of the monster wretched and foul and sour in her nose, but the thought that maybe what she was doing was actually helping? That went a long way to keep Jill from letting go.
From out of nowhere, two locomotives blasted straight into Madix’s chest, and even though he didn’t fall, Rogue and King were apparently well enough to do it again. The second blow had him teetering, and on the third, the monster howled, he shrieked, and Jill let go with just enough time to get out from under his falling body before he smashed her into the ground.
“Now!” she heard Draven shout. “You got a gun, use it!”
Jill stared in disbelief for a moment at what they’d just done. She heard Draven shouting, but her head was a jumble of panic and adrenaline. She was so dizzy, so disoriented from the wild airplane spinning she’d just done, that it was all she could do to stand.
She took one halting step, then another. Just when she thought she’d managed to catch her balance, it turned out that last step? One too close.
Madix’s insane, bloodshot, yellowed-out eyes flared open right be
fore he sat up and planted a fist right in the center of Jill’s chest.
The air rushed out of her in a torrent, and came back with a wheeze that felt black at first, and then like fire burning inside her. She didn’t know what she hit, or even if she’d hit anything, but whatever happened, she was not okay.
She felt herself sucking a breath that seemed like it never came. She fought, tugging the air into her lungs, blowing it all out and then trying again.
Rushing into her, bringing every nerve to life, the air she sucked in came with a slight aroma of coppery blood, and the dirt in which she was laying. Jill heard noises behind her, tried to make sense of them, but honestly in the pain she was in? Breathing was enough of a trick, forget about advanced rational thought.
She heard Rogue call out – or maybe it was a cry of pain. She didn’t know, couldn’t tell. But then King made a noise, and someone else – Draven? Must’ve been.
A roar that chilled her to the core came next. The force of the sound was like drinking a pot of real strong coffee after drinking eight beers too many. She sucked a breath, in surprise. Pain shot through every nerve in her body. Jill turned to see the mutant beast pick up the old man at his feet and hurl him, effortlessly, into the side of the chopper.
The old bear hit with a thud, so hard that the huge metal bird waivered in the sky.
“No!” Jill cried out, pushing herself backward, blinded by pain but unwilling to give up.
She kept on moving backwards. She heard a footstep, then another.
Madix, she realized as a shock of cold shot through her. He’s...
She scrabbled at the ground, trying to get a handhold, trying to get up.
Rogue called her name, King screamed for her.
And then she wrapped her hand around a rubber grip. She felt cold steel rivets.
Her fingers closed instinctively around the pistol she’d forgotten was in the belt holster Jacques gave her. When she hit the tree, the holster must’ve come loose, but the gun stayed right where it was supposed to stay. She opened her eyes, but in the darkness, this far away from everything where she’d been thrown? It was hard to see her own hand, let alone anything else.
