by Lynn Red
“And no one else can get hurt out here,” I added, thinking of the people in town being swept up into some shitstorm they had nothing to do with. And also, maybe because I still felt guilty that I had at least indirectly brought this on them, no matter what Dax said otherwise. “I’d have a tough time if someone got hurt over me.”
Dax turned his head quickly to the right, staring into the grayscale darkness. I couldn’t see or hear what he obviously could, but soon enough I heard a branch—a big one from the sound of it—crack and tumble to the ground, demolishing the leaves underneath.
“What was that?”
Dax waved me off and hushed me. “Stay down,” was all he said. “And get that gun ready.”
My fingers trembled as I pressed five shells into the top of the sawn-off. I’d done some shooting before, but never anything quite as much of a cannon as this thing. The cool steel of the barrel and the slightly warmer wood of the handle welcomed my hand as I wrapped it tight with my fingers, clutching the weapon like my life depended on it.
“Am I going to shoot anyone?” I asked, as the reality that I may well have to do so set in and got me shivering. “I’m not sure I could kill someone that didn’t really deserve it.”
“Wouldn’t kill ‘em. Even old man Wyatt could take a few loads of buckshot without much trouble. But it will slow him down, assuming this even goes far enough to need that sort of thing.”
A crash that sounded like a mixture of thunder and a bomb going off sounded in the distance, though not too far away from where were hiding.
“Okay,” I said with my heart thudding heavily into my chest. “That I heard. What was it?”
Dax shook his head. The moonlight glittered seductively off his tanned skin, making him look even more serious than he did anyway. His high cheekbones and stubbly cheeks caught my eyes and before I knew it, I was just staring dumbly at him.
“No time for lovelorn staring,” he said with a quick quirk of a smile. “Even though I’d rather spend every second of my time watching those hips of yours and those eyes... even though all I want to do right now is throw you over one of these branches and give you what we both need. All that being said, I’m pretty sure there are at least two very angry werebears hunting for us, and it won’t be long before they wander over here.”
I started to speak, but Dax interrupted me with a kiss. “When they do, I want you to know that there’s no way in hell they’re going to hurt you. They’ll have to skin me alive before that happens. And, Raine?”
“Yeah?” I asked, my heart fluttering just a little at Dax’s alpha act.
“Ain’t nobody gonna skin Daxon Mark. You understand me?”
Another breaking limb caught my attention, but only for a second. When I returned my gaze to Dax, his eyes were full yellow and his teeth grew longer and sharper. Before long, thick golden-brown hair covered his forearms, and only seconds after that, his shirt split right down the middle and his jeans ripped up the leg seams.
“You maybe should’ve taken all that off first,” I said. “They’re never going to let you in McDonald’s like that.”
He grunted a bear laugh that boomed and rolled like thunder across the plains.
“Dax! Hey Dax!” The voice that came was thick with both whiskey and an accent. The ends of each word whistled a bit. It was Jack Creighton, and he didn’t sound particularly happy. “Look out, Dax!”
“Shut your damn mouth, hillbilly,” a sharp, heavy voice trailed. “Keep your mouth shut, or I’ll stuff a pair of bullets down there to help you.”
“You stay here,” Dax said. “They have Jack, and as odd as it is, he’s my friend. Captain Skullet isn’t going to hurt either one of you.”
“Captain...?”
“He’s bald on the top and has a long ponytail,” Dax said with another bear laugh. “It is, how you say, joke? Looking for moose and squirrel?”
“I’m being one-linered by a magical bear,” I said with a tone of comical disbelief. “Fuck the whole world, but at least I’m fairly sure I’m not crazy.”
Dax shrugged a golden shoulder. “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” he said. “Hunch down in the reeds, I’m going around behind them. You keep right where you are until you see the whites... or whatever, of Wyatt’s eyes and then you pump his guts full of lead.”
He noticed, I guess, that my hands were shaking and I was struggling to keep my lips together and not start babbling like an idiot.
“You’re not going to kill him,” he said. “We heal too quickly for a gutshot to kill us. And we’re much too tough for regular shot to do much damage anyway. All we’re aiming to do is slow him down so we can figure out what he wants and get him out of town.”
I nodded, summoning every shred of courage I had. Dax turned in the direction of the noises we’d been hearing, and moved like he was going to head out, but froze and turned back to me instead. “You don’t have to do this,” he said with a curled bear lip. “You can just hide and leave it to me. But... I need you, Raine. I’m not going to lie. I need your help.”
You... do? I thought. No one outside of Karen or Matt ever asked me for help before. I guess they all thought I was too fragile. After all, I was with Dan and all that. Maybe they were always walking on eggshells around me for fear of breaking me?
“You need me?”
He nodded. “I need you to love me and I need to see your smile and hear your laugh. But also, I need you to help me end this stupid war. I need you to be as strong as I know you are.”
I watched him for a long second. Bravery? It certainly wasn’t something I was used to showing. Then again, maybe I had been brave all along, and just convinced myself I wasn’t. That wouldn’t be out of character at all. I found myself nodding without thinking about it. “You can count on me,” I said softly. “I won’t let you down.”
“You never could,” Dax said as he turned around. “Even if you tried, you couldn’t let me down. Now let’s get rid of a meddling bear, huh?”
I nodded. “All for one?”
“One for all,” he answered. “The two musketeers. I always liked the Steve Martin movie better than the serious ones. It always seemed to me that Dumas meant for it to be a more light-hearted, fun story than people make it out to be. If you want serious, there’s always Count of Monte Cri—what? Why are you looking at me like that?”
I stared at him with wide open eyes. “I’m talking to a magical bear-man about Dumas? What the hell happened to my life?”
“It got a lot cooler,” Dax said, pulling his lips back into a snarling smile.
“You’re one in a million, Dax. Let’s get this shit over with.”
“I love that song,” he said. “Always did like Guns n’ Roses, even if—“
He caught himself and shook his huge head. “Right. No more tangents.”
“Not for now anyway,” I said.
Dax drew close enough that I could smell the forest and the earth on his fur. I stuck out a hand and let his golden coat slide between my outstretched fingers. His skin was warm, almost hot to the touch. His eyes blazed, and even with the terrifying size of his teeth, he had the most unbelievably tender look on his face.
“I love you, Raine,” he said. “I’ve known it since the moment I laid eyes on you. I knew it ever since that porta-potty.”
“That’s going to be a hell of a story to tell the grandkids, huh?” I asked, laughing under my breath. “I love you too, big guy.” I kissed the end of his snout. He let out a long, gentle, rumbling growl that reassured me that I could be brave. “And I guess G’n’R is okay too. Live and let die, huh?”
“That was Wings,” he said. “But yeah, let’s do this shit.”
As he turned, my hand slid along the side of his huge face, down his ribcage and finally flopped off, thudding against my thigh. He gave me one more glance before creeping off, forward into the darkness. The way his eyes burned into my soul, the way just the sound of his breathing made my heart skip a beat, I never knew anything could
be like that.
I’d always heard about love at first sight and finding someone that made you feel like two bodies that shared a soul, and I always thought it was bullshit from Sandra Bullock movies. But here I was, living it out in the most unlikely place I could imagine. Right that second, as I crouched back down into the brush and leveled the shotgun in the direction Dax ran off, I realized exactly how apt Dax’s words had been.
“Life does have a funny way of working out the way it’s supposed to work out,” I whispered, cocking the shotgun and chambering a shell. “Love too.”
-19-
Laundry Hampers And Lovin’
Jack Creighton was mumbling. His mush-mouthed pain was obvious from his voice, but just how hurt he was, and what sort of shape he was in, we had no idea.
The stillness of the night, with Dax gone and that other bear looming large out there... somewhere, struck me with an arrow’s shot of fear straight into my heart. Adrenaline pumped through every vein in my body, stiffening my resolve and flooding out the fear and the trepidation. I squeezed the stock of my shotgun like it was a life preserver. And honestly, it may as well have been, because without that thing, I was completely helpless.
I stared up at the sky, listening for any sign of action from nearby. Channeling my energies into the moonlight gave me the slightest bit of respite. Of course, when I let myself sit and think for a few minutes, the adrenaline started to subside and emotion and reason had an unfortunate opportunity to mix into a sour brew in my guts.
“Calm down,” I told myself. “In a few minutes this will all be over and you and Dax can go get a nice shower and he can bend you over a log or whatever.”
I laughed at myself, which proved to be just the cure I needed. All my doubts and my fears slide down my face like the gentle rain that started to patter down. Rain, I thought. Could anything be more obvious? If I needed a sign that this is where I’m supposed to be, here it is.
A roar in the distance caught my attention, breaking my brief reverie. After the roar came what I thought was snapping teeth, clenching jaws and what must be a howl of pain. He told me to stay down, to keep myself safe, but when I heard the howl of pain I knew that if he was willing to put himself on the line for me, then I’d damn sure do it for him. Of course, I didn’t know if it was even Dax howling, but it didn’t matter. If one of them was hurt enough to make a sound like that, then the other one could easily feel that pain too.
And I’ll be damned if I was gonna let Daxon feel like that.
The rain covered my approach, and from the scene that played out in front of me as I came up upon the battling bears, I knew that there wasn’t a question in the world that me and my shotgun were going to be blessings.
Dax was bleeding from the mouth, and from a gash on his forehead that ran down the side of his snout. The bear he was locked in a tie-up with had a coat that was white-gray and streaked with crimson. It reminded me of two huge wrestlers locked up and grunting, heaving, and bleeding all over each other. It was impossible to tell which blood belonged to which bear, but when I saw Jack Creighton laying in a heap, I knew he needed my attention.
Dax took a big swipe at the older bear with a grunt of effort. I looked at him, and for a moment I think he shot me a grin. The gray bear staggered backward, stunned by the blow, and as a tendril of blood dripped from his mouth, Dax jumped again, burying his claws in gray fur. He tore and ripped but it wasn’t enough. When I got to Creighton’s side, I took another glance at the battle and saw Wyatt on top of Dax, taking potshots at his head.
“Jack!” I cried. “Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
He was a bloody mess. Split lips, busted eyebrow and one giant black eye that seemed to circle his entire face made up Jack Creighton’s head. “Sumbitch about killed me,” he said, although ‘killed’ was pronounced like the thing Scotsmen wear. “He kep’ sayin’ he’d burn the Creek to the ground if I didn’t tell him what he wanted. I never woulda did this to Dax otherwise.”
“I know, hush,” I said, smoothing his thin halo of white hair down on his liver-spotted head. Jack Creighton shook his head to clear the cobwebs. “Everything is fine. Dax seems to have this under control.”
As if to punctuate and emphasize what I’d said, Dax flipped the older bear roughly onto his back and gave him an axe-handle blow to the face that had red streaks running through the man’s ponytail.
“He ain’t as humble as he looks,” Jack said. To emphasize that, Wyatt brought a knee up into Dax’s tailbone and then crunched an elbow in his face. “And he’s got backup.”
“He does?” I asked. “Looks like he’s pretty alone out here to me.”
“There’s more in town,” Jack said. “He snatched me and two of my cubs off the road and beat the livin’ bejesus out of me. He said there were a big gaggle of ‘em headed toward town and said if I didn’t take him to Dax, he’d make sure he didn’t make it out of town alive.”
Dax looked my direction and gave me a big smile just in time for a haymaker to knock it off his face. Just then, as things were starting to look embarrassingly dire for my lover’s chances against his geriatric opponent, things took a turn for the way the fuck worse: trucks rumbled along the road, although the only way I noticed them was Jack turned and grumbled about how loud trucks are these days.
“Trucks? How many?”
He cocked a caterpillar eyebrow at me and smiled. The grin made his lip crack open again and a trickle of blood dripped into his wiry beard. “How many shells you got in that thing?”
“This?” I shook my gun. “Five. Well, and three pockets full of shells to go along with ‘em.”
He nodded and pulled a snub-nosed pistol out of his boot. “Seriously?” I asked. “You had that thing and no one found it?”
Creighton shrugged. “Ain’t gonna do much to a bear with this little baby thing.”
“That’s a .38,” I said with slight astonishment. “Really?”
“Ever talked to somebody what shot a bear with a pistol?”
“Er, no, I guess not.”
“There’s a reason for that,” Creighton said with a smirk. “They end up comin’ over that hill like a stormin’ army, you fill ‘em full of buckshot and I’ll, well, I’ll run.”
I cracked a laugh. Dax took another punch and gave one back just as good.
I cocked my shotgun, and finally heard the trucks bouncing along the road coming toward us. I cocked it again. “That was for show,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to do that. Maybe I should try out acting?”
Jack cracked a smile, and Dax cracked Wyatt’s jaw so hard the bear’s huge head snapped around to the side. It looked like it would spin off his neck if he took another shot, but no such luck. The trucks were getting closer, the rain was starting to pound a little harder on the leaves at my feet. Humus and rot filled my nose, along with a dash of that unforgettable scent of aspen and cottonwood from the trees all around us.
As if the cosmos wanted to heighten the drama, a pair of lightning bolts blasted through the sky, framing the silver disc of the moon and blinding me for just a moment.
Dax roared, threw back his head and raked a claw across Wyatt’s face and chest, laying open the hide. The old bear stumbled three steps and fell to the ground, motionless. Like something out of a wilderness documentary, Dax stood on his hind legs, roared viciously and pounded his chest with his massive bear arms. Six inch long black claws came down hard on the old bear’s motionless body, but a split second later, they were all a storm of teeth and claws once again.
“Are they ever going to stop?” I asked.
Jack cracked a smile. “Yeah, when one of ‘em is dead. But we gotta keep ‘em from doin’ that. Wyatt dies out here, the council will send an exploration party for sure. Dax dies, well, that ain’t any good either.”
The trucks rumbled closer, their tires squishing in the mud that now ringed our creek clearing. So much rain was falling that my eyes had trouble staying open through the constant soak. “What do we
do?” I asked as the trucks crested the hill and headlights shot, starkly white, through the trees. Their light refracted by dust and falling leaves and raindrops, I counted six beams. “Three trucks? Shit, Jack, what are we going to do?”
“Dax!” he shouted. “More’s comin’! You better do something to keep ‘em from winnin’!”
“I’m trying,” Dax grunted. He backhanded Wyatt, once again sending the old bear to the ground. He seemed to be weakening, but just barely. If there were three truckloads of foot soldiers about to unload on us, there wasn’t a chance in hell. “Keep ‘em busy for a second.”
I saw the glint of something metallic shimmer around Dax’s wrist. It was just his bracelet, which I always took to be the bear version of a LifeAlert bracelet. Before I could spend too much time thinking about his choice of jewelry, a truck door opened and slammed. Boots hit the ground and Jack grabbed the bottom of my shirt, dragging me down into the muck. “When I says, you jump up and just start shootin’,” he said. “You got it?”
I swallowed hard enough for my throat to click. “I’ve never shot anybody before, but... well I guess there’s no time like the present to try something new.”
“You ain’t gonna kill any of ‘em,” he said to reassure me. “It’d take a hell of a lot more than what you’re packing.”
I don’t know if what he said actually helped, or if my nerves were finally just steeled to the point that it didn’t matter what happened, I was going to protect my family. “Don’t worry,” I finally said. “No one’s going to hurt my family. Not now, not ever.”
Jack’s caterpillar eyebrows twitched. “Good, now go.”
I nodded, biting down on my lip and waiting for the signal.
“Go,” he said again.
“Huh? Go where?”
“Shoot! Shoot!”
Without a second though, I leaped to my feet and proceeded to unload all five shells in quick succession, not really aiming at anything in particular. If I had been, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since after the first shot I was reeling from the kick and hardly able to keep my feet underneath myself. One voice grunted and another shouted a curse I couldn’t make out.
