by Lynn Red
He swallowed as a bead of sweat ran down his temple. The droplet made its way down his beardless cheek to the scar on his jaw. It followed the line to his chin, where it dripped down onto the ether-soaked rag he clutched in his hand.
Fear wasn’t an issue, and neither was power. But in the second before he plowed through the door, knocked this girl out and kidnapped her, Langston felt a hitch in his chest.
What am I doing? How did I go from an archaeologist to... this, whatever it is I am? He shook his head. Of all the times to question himself, Graves thought, paused in front of the door behind which the last victim he needed was lurking?
Victim. These girls aren’t victims. I’m helping them. I’m taking some of the edge off their instincts, I’m making life easier for them. Why should I feel bad?
That flimsy justification turned out to be all the convincing he needed. Gritting his teeth, Langston Graves, assistant professor of art history, lifted up his foot, clenched his rag and his blindfold bag in his fists and kicked the absolute shit out of Desdemona’s door.
A splinter running the entire length of the doorframe split off and flew backwards over Langston’s head. He flinched slightly, collected himself for a half-second, and kicked again. This time, as he battered the door, he whispered an incantation that made his strength flare up enough to send the door exploding backwards.
The hinges creaked as the door slammed against the wall behind it, and fell to the ground.
“What the hell is going—” Desdemona shrieked, pushing back against the wall and half-shifted.
As soon as Graves got near enough, she lashed out, cutting his arm deep with her claws, and then drove a foot into his stomach. The professor let out a grunt, and then a second when she slashed him again.
“What are you doing here?” she screamed.
Desdemona’s eyes had gone yellow and short, spotted fur crept out of her arms. She dove off the bed, taking another rake at Graves, but with the help of a little incantation to speed him up, he dodged. “You’re not supposed to fight!” he shrieked, diving wildly for her but missing.
She whirled around again. With a war cry, she dragged her extending claws down the attacker’s arm, tearing through his black shirt and drawing blood.
He let out another screech, and swung wide. Desdemona feinted backward and then twisted to the left, and clawed him again.
That time, he was able to jump back just enough for her to swing short. Her fingernails caught his shirt and tore off a button, but nothing more. She spun and he followed her momentum.
“Spirited!” he said, locking his arm around her and getting the rag in her face. “But no more of that!”
She kicked, violently, and even caught Graves with another claw to the face, but his sorcery was surging, and he didn’t notice. Not for a time, anyway. Moments later, the chemical took effect and she went limp. He snugged the bag down over her head, and threw her over his shoulder, turning to leave.
When he deposited Desdemona’s limp, but breathing, body in the trunk of the car, he didn’t notice Jeffress’s eyes fixed on him.
He didn’t notice the smile on the automaton’s face.
-22-
Lilah
“I went to bed with the world’s most incredible bear, and I woke up to Winnie the Pooh?”
I giggled, blinking in the sunlight that streamed through the room as Rex fumbled around wearing a shirt and no pants. “Not that I mind,” I added. “Just... maybe the look would be better if you didn’t have that shirt on either?”
Kind of dazed-looking, Rex turned to me as one of the dumbest, doofiest grins I’ve ever seen spread across his face. I pushed myself up on my elbows and realized that not only was he cultivating the shirt-and-no-pants look, he was also wearing some pretty tragic white tube socks with red stripes around the tops.
“Oh my,” I said, shaking my head. “There’s, uh, about six million things wrong with this picture. There’s one thing very right, though.”
“Huh?” he made this sort of half-brained grunt that made me giggle. “Say there, have you seen my pants?”
Rex stuck his stomach out as much as he could, and tucked the bottom of his t-shirt over the top. I was just about to suffocate to keep myself from screaming with laughter. I guess he noticed the ruddy color I took on, because about a second later, he let out a huge “ha!” when he hit the wall for holding his breath and sticking his stomach out.
“How are you somehow this hot, this good of a person, and still capable of being a totally stupid man-child at the same time?” It took a while to get that out in between all the laughing and catching my breath.
By the time I managed to get myself back to normal, Rex had wandered off to find his pants, and I was a little irritated by my phone starting to buzz. “It’s always something,” I said as I rolled to the side and picked it up.
Unknown number. Probably someone wanting to ask me about an overdue library book or let me know that the wrong person’s prescription was ready at CVS.
“Hello?” I asked. My voice was a little grumbly from not being used very much. When no one responded, I cleared my throat and got the grumbly stuff, whatever it was, moving a little.
Still, no answer. But I could make out breathing. Not like pervert crank call heavy breathing, just regular, normal, in and out. And then I heard a beeping sound, and a few bumps. Maybe like someone was in a car and butt-dialed?
Rex came back in, unfortunately dressed completely, and cocked his head at me as I stared at the phone. “Something up?” he asked.
“Weird call. Just some breathing, maybe some road noise?”
He shrugged. “Put it on speaker? I made a call like that, once.” His voice was distant and he seemed almost instantly very serious about something. “Whatever you do, don’t hang up.”
The way his voice shifted got me worried. Really worried. “What do you think it is?” I asked.
Rex shook his head and laid the phone speaker side up on the bed. The breathing and the quiet beeping continued. Except then, the sound of someone talking very distantly became audible. When I opened my mouth, he put up a hand to quiet me and tilted his head toward the phone.
He squinted and shook his head. “Can’t make anything out. It’s a car though, or the back of one. Do you have another phone?”
I let out a hollow laugh. “The one time I need a landline. Of course it happens the week after I finally cancel it.”
“So no?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Okay. Think, Rex, think. Neighbors? People live next door, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Uh, some college kids. They usually have pretty late nights.”
He grinned. “Hangovers I can deal with.”
“Oh, not like that,” I said. “It’s a pair of possums. Brother and sister.”
Rex closed his eyes and I could see him roll them behind his lids. “Jamesburg,” he said with a laugh. “Well anyway, you keep listening to this. If you hear anything, keep a note. And I mean anything, like—”
There was a clunk and an audible, if muffled, series of shouts.
“Like that?” I finished for him.
“Yeah, exactly like that. Note the time, and the sound.” He pulled a small notebook out of the back pocket of his jeans and tossed it to me. There was a small click-pen clipped to the front. “Write down everything.”
I half grinned at him as I picked it up. “All right, Special Agent Lee. I’ll do it.”
“Hey,” he said, turning. “You don’t spend two years as a military police investigator and not have at least a little of it stick. Possums, next door? Or across the hall.”
“Next door, number three. You might have to knock kind of a lot.”
He crossed the room in the blink of an eye and kissed me on the forehead, letting his lips linger for just a moment. I felt his breath, the whiskers on his chin, and it thrilled me. But what I really felt, what really got me, was the warmth of his love more than that of his lips.<
br />
“Hurry,” I said. “I’m worried.”
Rex nodded, and disappeared down the hall and out the front door. For a second I didn’t hear anything, but then a series of knocks echoed through the breezeway. The next knocks made my walls shake, and I almost felt sorry for the kids who were about to find Rex, looking all ruffled and slightly disheveled, standing on their doorstep.
He would be a little bit scary if I wasn’t so in love with him, I guess. Six and a half feet of muscle, whiskers, and hair. Just thinking about him got my pulse going a little bit, but then another series of clanking noises from my phone brought me back to earth.
“Metal on metal, 8:09,” I wrote, then quickly followed up with, “voices – inaudible – 8:10.”
I heard Rex say something, and then repeat himself, and then I heard someone yawn very loudly. Sometimes these raccoon senses are useful, sometimes – like when I’m using a public restroom – they’re obnoxious. Other times, being able to hear the minutiae of life is just funny.
A few seconds later, he was back and already on the phone. “Yeah, I need a cell trace,” he was saying. “There’s a chance someone is in danger and I need a cell phone’s signal triangulated.”
The words coming out of his mouth were unbelievable. Finally, he seemed satisfied and hung up. “What do you know about this guy?”
Rex’s intensity had my insides all twisted up. I knew what was going on – or at least I think I did – but I wasn’t sure I could allow myself to accept it just yet. Whatever was going on, the open phone line making all kinds of bizarre noises, had something to do with my sister and her friends. What, exactly it was though, was lost on me.
“You must know something,” Rex said, laying his hand on my shoulder. “I think we both know what’s going on here.”
“Yeah,” I said, wishing I didn’t. “I don’t know much. I just went to class with them that one time, because of the storms. He’s tall, really tall, really thin and pale. He’s got this long, sorta crooked nose, and scars on his jaws.” I traced my fingertip down my jaw as a visual aid.
“Baghdad,” Rex said. His voice was hollow and distant, like he was remembering something he really didn’t want to be remembering. “You said something about Mesopotamia?”
“I did?” I sat there for a second, listening to the white noise from the phone and chewing my lip. “Oh! Yeah, that’s what he teaches. Art history, but he’s some kind of specialist in ancient Mesopotamian whatever.”
“I...” Rex trailed off. I had never seen him like that before – so distracted, so obviously upset. “I think I have something I need to tell you.”
A storm cloud gathered behind his kind, brown eyes. I almost didn’t want him to tell me whatever was about to come out of his mouth. I blinked, realizing that I was being ridiculous. If I was allowed to be vulnerable and raw and open, and I could tell him about my pains and my hurting, why couldn’t he?
It was almost like it dawned on me right then that what we were – together, in love, whatever you want to call it – the more we opened up the more real it got.
At first I wasn’t sure that this was a kind of real that I wanted. Living in a fantasy where everyone’s awesome all the time and no one cries, that’s the dream, isn’t it? But it’s also about the furthest thing that exists from reality.
I put my hands on his huge shoulders and stroked his neck with my thumbs. “I want you to be able to tell me anything you need to tell me.
He swallowed, hard. “I’ve seen him before. This professor of yours, I’ve had a run in with him. Or you could call it that, I guess.”
“Your scars?” I asked. I knew the answer before the words came out of my mouth. “Is that...?”
Rex nodded and swallowed again. His throat clicked like it was dry as he did. “I don’t know who he is, really, or what kind of, uh, powers he has. In Iraq, I was with a demolition squad. Fitting,” he said, grinning at the look I gave him. “Bear in a demolition squad. I know, but no one knew about me, obviously. I’ve always been able to keep myself from going too nuts and shifting out of nowhere.”
I looked down at my toes.
“Except with you, apparently,” he said. “And the Edgewood bears give me the worst rage I’ve ever felt in my life. But anyway, the point is, I was on a detail to clear out a few old buildings on the edge of a district in the middle of town. We were going to demolish them to build some apartments, that kind of thing.”
“He made me feel like time stopped,” I said out of nowhere. Rex paused.
“You... like you got tunnel vision? Everything seemed to slow down?”
I nodded.
He looked out the window, then closed his eyes and rubbed them with his thumb and forefinger. “At the time, I had no idea what happened. I went into this old building, an old museum that hadn’t been used in a decade or more. I was just going through it, making sure there were no squatters or any weapons – basically just making sure it was safe to be demolished.”
His gaze got long and thoughtful, and he cleared his throat. In the pause, there were some more clanking sounds from the phone, and I wrote them down.
Finally he shook his head. “Anyway, I was clearing this building, and then the next thing I know, I’m stumbling around in the street feeling like something’s been burned into my brain. These headaches I get, that’s when they started. I’ll be going around like nothing’s wrong and then suddenly I’ll have a flash of white and my head will start pounding so hard I can’t even think.”
“Winter,” I said. “That’s... oh my God. When she showed up at my apartment, she had no idea what was going on. She wasn’t even coherent enough to realize anything had happened.”
Rex nodded, slowly. “It wasn’t until the rest of my crew told me I’d been AWOL for almost a week that I had any idea that anything happened. Well, except for these.” He touched his scars. “I still don’t know what happened in that building. But I’ve had dreams.”
“About him?” I asked.
Rex just kept staring out the window. “It all came back to me very slowly. I mean over years. At first I just had these night terrors and figured it was from the combat or any of the other stuff I saw over there. I mean, it’d make sense. But then, this shrink I was visiting told me to keep a dream journal.”
He laughed, hollowly at the window. “Sounded like some Sigmund Freud shit, you know? Dream journals, interpreting the wild stuff my brain came up with at night. At first, I told her how stupid it was, and that I just needed more sleep, needed some drugs to balance me out. She gave me the drugs, and that was good, because the rages stopped. She never pushed me about the journal, either.”
“I can guess how this story ends,” I said. I got up off the bed and walked to Rex’s side, putting my arm around his waist. At my first touch, he flinched a little but then relaxed.
“I’m a stubborn bastard sometimes,” he said, with another laugh. “Everybody is, I guess. But anyway, she never badgered me about it. Every appointment, she made a joke about my dream diary, I’d laugh it off and we’d move on. That is, until one night when I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”
Turning into the parking lot, a police SUV pulled in, and turned off the flashers. Two men hopped out and started fiddling with a bunch of incredibly complicated looking equipment.
“What changed?” I asked when it became obvious Rex wasn’t going to keep talking on his own.
“I saw his face.”
That hung in the air for a moment.
“One night I was asleep, like always – hell, I slept most days too back then – and I dreamed of this flickering fluorescent light swinging on a chain like in the movies. It was just dangling there above my head, swinging back and forth and creaking on the chain. The light was so blindingly bright and so close to my face that I couldn’t see anything, and I was tied down. Or maybe not tied, but bound somehow.
“I started thrashing back and forth, figuring that I’d be able to break free. After all, I am a bear. I’ve got
some strength in this big body.”
I hugged closer to him, and he draped one of his huge arms around my shoulders. When I looked up at his face, Rex was staring, dead-eyed, at the guys in the parking lot.
“I couldn’t. The metal or the ropes or whatever, it just bit deeper as I tried to free myself. It was no good, but I couldn’t stop, either. I was in a full-blown panic. Leena came in and tried to wake me up, but I was just shaking and trembling. I scared her half to death.”
I was nodding, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.
“So, that’s when I finally got over myself and wrote it down. Every detail. I even drew a little picture of the face. Ever since, I’ve wanted to find him, but had no idea how.” His voice was a grim, gravelly tone with a whole lot of barely bottled rage.
“I guess that problem solved itself, huh?”
-23-
Lilah
“What do we do?” I asked. The hyenas were setting up some crazy looking doohickey to my phone, and before long, had a good connection.
“You leave it to us,” one of them – who I didn’t recognize – said. “Lieutenant Jorgenson sent us special. We’re the best Jamesburg’s got.”
Rex looked at the pair slightly askance. “How many times have you done this?”
The talkative of the two paused. “Twice,” he said. “I’ve opened lots of safes though, and after all, how much different is this than hooking up a stereo? It’s all color-coded.”
“That’s... uh...” Rex trailed off.
The hyena’s look got real sharp, real quick. “I have no idea how many times I’ve triangulated cell signals. I can tell you though that the state police call the two of us when they need some obscure signal tracked, or they need someone to find someone based on next to no information except a last-known. If there’s some way to track this car down, we’ll do it.”
“Calm down, Daniels,” the other one said. He stuck his hand out toward Rex. “I’m Clayton. Greg Clayton. And the gruff, grumpy jackass is Frank Daniels. He tends to be overly short for dramatic effect, but what he doesn’t realize is that no one is actually impressed.”
