Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (18 page)

And now?

Well, to say everything was different would be a comical understatement.

“I turned into a goddamn bear,” Claire said, still amazed. “I... I turned into a bear.”

“Oh it ain’t so bad,” Draven said, “gets a little itchy sometimes, but that’s what trees are for.”

After a few moments of silence, he snorted at his own joke. “Get it? Like... scratching against a tree? Get it?”

Jill patted him on the shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “It’s just not funny.”

That got the old bear going even harder.

Jacques sputtered, coughing himself awake for the first time since he’d been screeching and groaning as they ran through the brush woods on the fringe of the forest. “They got ‘em,” he croaked, almost incoherently. “Got ‘em... they got ‘em...”

“Got who?” Jill asked, wiping her forearm across a sweat-soaked face. Her hair hung down in long, limp strands and stuck to the woman’s freckled cheeks. Her whole face seemed sunken, sallow, like she was terribly worried, though she’d never say so. She kept looking down, kept looking around, picking up random things off the ground and examining them.

“The bears,” Jacques said. His clammy face streaked with cold sweat. “Well, most of ‘em anyway,” he said with a nod to Claire and Draven.

Claire wrung out one of her torn sleeves after she wiped the old Cajun’s face once again. Her clothes were a tattered mess, hardly staying together. The only reason her pants still functioned as pants was because she was able to fashion a rough sort of belt out of the laces of her ruined shoes to keep her shredded trousers from falling.

“Someone is, at some point, going to explain all this to me, right? I mean, how does a girl just up and turn into a bear?”

Draven grabbed the back of Claire’s bruised, cut neck with one of his callused hands. He massaged gently, the way a person would reassure a scared child. “In time, yes. As soon as I’m sure, yes, I’ll tell you. But before that, we have to make sure everyone’s together. This is something that’s... well let’s put it this way. I’ve spent my whole life looking for the rest of the Broken Pines. And now, there are two more of ‘em running around.”

“Broken... pine? Huh?”

“Our clan,” Jill answered. “Rogue, King, and your two – what were their names?”

“Fury and Stone.”

“Right. The four of them, and about thirty cubs. We thought that’s all that was left. I mean, Draven had the idea that GlasCorp had kept a bunch of them alive for experimentation or... making mercenaries or—”

“Is that what those orderlies were?”

Jacques coughed again, and spat a wad of phlegm and blood on the ground beside where he lay. “Didn’t you all hear me? Those robots – orderlies – whatever they are, I heard them chattering about Rogue. Said he was downstairs, whatever that means, and said he was causin’ some kinda problem.”

“Sounds like Rogue,” Jill said, a wistful smile crossing her face for a moment. “But what the hell does ‘downstairs’ mean? These are people who managed to trick me into landing a helicopter on top of a fake hospital. I think at some point we need to be slightly more realistic about our ability to fight something like this. We
need
them. Without those two?”

“Four,” Claire said.

“Four. Without them, we’re gonna have a hell of a time.”

“We need,” Draven said, slowly, in the voice he used when he was deep in planning. “To figure out that building. Is it a complex? Is it connected to others somehow? Do you know anything about this?” He turned to Claire as he asked the question. “You worked there for two years, six months, three weeks, two days and—”

She was staring at him, mouth agape. Considering the whole just-turned-into-a-bear thing, it was pretty fantastic that of all that, the most surprising bit to her was that Draven knew so much about her schedule.

“So, tell me about my boyfriend next.”

“Which one? Stone? Fury?”

Holy shit, there it is
. As soon as he said that, a knot that felt like it was approximately the size of a mutant grapefruit sprouted in Claire’s throat. There wasn’t really any reason to deny it, but the words being said gave the whole thing more gravity, more reality.

“They’re...?”

“No, of course not,” Draven said. “Mates are a much more serious business than boyfriends.”

He hadn’t expected to see her get
quite
that pale. But to her credit, Claire managed to choke back the confusion and total weirded-outness. “Right,” she said. “I guess it would be more serious than a boyfriend. But no, I have no idea about the place. I honestly thought it was just a building where a bunch of nerds did experiments on mice.”

“Mice, bears, pretty close to the same thing.” Draven had a wry grin on his face as he fished a cigarette out of his pocket.

“Wait, why are your clothes all fine? Why didn’t they rip?”

To show her, Draven grabbed one of his flannel sleeves and stretched it almost six inches before letting it snap back into place. “Spandex. Now, tell me about this building you worked in. Even if there’s not much you can remember, or at least not much that seems important, any detail, any kind of idea what kind of place we’re dealing with, it might help.”

With a deep breath, Claire started to recite every single detail of her building, from the guarded entrance to the massive elevators and the underground labs that were more or less the same thing as heavily armored bunkers.

Draven sat and listened, Jill and Jacques were caught up in tending the curious hole in the pilot’s chest. After every point of interest she recited, the old man clicked his tongue and nodded. Every so often he’d grunt assent, or prod the palm of his hand with a fingertip like that was as particularly important point.

“And they were underground?”

“Yeah,” Claire nodded. “All the way down in the deepest part of the place, basement three. Takes about five minutes from the surface, heading downward on that elevator, to get all the way down there.”

Draven made a few more notes. “No problem,” he announced, standing up and twisting at the waist, back and forth to pop his back. “I can work with that.”

He started toward where Jill and Jacques were sitting, but Claire grabbed the old man’s wrist, turning him back to face her. “You can work with it? What about me? Is anyone ever going to fill me in on what the hell is going on? Or how about let’s be even more basic – what the hell
am
I?”

His calm, gray eyes studied Claire’s face for a moment. Draven took a deep breath through his nostrils, then puffed his lips out and exhaled. “I know exactly how long you’ve been there, and I know exactly who Stone and Fury are.”

“I sense a ‘but’ coming on.”

“But,” he said, grinning slightly, “you are... I have no idea. You’re special. We’re born the way we are. We have no choice, no option. We shift from the time we’re babies until the day we die. It’s as much part of us as your hair is part of you.” Draven pinched one of Claire’s dirty curls between his fingers. “For someone to just... pop?” he shook his head slowly. “Claire, you have to understand. That building, that place you worked,
that
is where every single female Broken Pine clan bear was taken. Most of the cubs, too, and more than a handful of males. The one thing I don’t understand is how you have that birthmark, which is the same one Jill has, unless...”

He trailed off, looking past Claire and into the darkness behind her, lost in thought.

“Unless what?” she asked, her voice jolting him back to reality.

“Unless somehow you were one of us and got... separated? Taken? Brainwashed?” He shook his head again, chewing on his bottom lip. “No, that wouldn’t make any sense. Only the mates of the alphas ever have that mark, and those two aren’t—”

“Can I tell you something?” Claire cut him off. “I can’t stop thinking about them. It’s not even just a little fantasy thing. It’s like I literally cannot stop thinking about Fury and Stone. They’re scarred, marked with all kinds of lines and cuts from the things GlasCorp did to them, but it’s not even that that I can’t stop seeing in my mind. It’s their eyes.”

At that, Draven cocked an eyebrow. “Their eyes? What about them? Is there anything... strange about them?”

“They both have opposite colored eyes.”

“Is that so?”

“Stone, his left is green and the right is gold. Fury’s the other way around.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. I’ll be
goddamned
.”

Claire was waiting for him to say more, to explain what it was, exactly, that had him so damned. Instead though, he just sat back on his heels, rocking slightly back and forth, lost in thought.

It wasn’t until Jill burst through the trees, waving her arms around in a full-on panic that the old man came back to himself. “What is it?” he asked, clearly not understanding the frenetic panic of the situation. “What’s going on?”

“They’re here,” Jill said. “Rogue, King, and the other two – they’re...”

“Hello, Draven,” Stone said, his voice smooth and sweet. “Been a long time,” Fury added.

Claire shot Jill a sidelong glance, and the two drew quickly together. “Where did they come from?”

“I have no idea,” Jill whispered. “They just... appeared. Rogue said he’d been looking for us. But... something’s not right. Something—”

A roar split the night that was so strong it shook the trees.

The next second, Rogue had Fury by the throat. Stone had leapt, pinning King to the ground.

Jaws snapped, dagger-like teeth dripped with rage.

“No!” Claire shouted, charging forward – for what purpose she had no idea. “No! They’re your friends! No!”

Draven caught her around the waist, forcing her to stop. “No,” he hissed between his teeth. “Something’s wrong. I know them. All of them. Or at least I did at one time. Just be careful, okay? And you four,” he turned to the bears, “calm the hell down. We’ll work through this. But
no
killing. Got it?”

Grumbling, the four bears slowly released their holds on one another, and relaxed into an uneasy peace.

Cleo, for her part, sauntered up to Fury and licked him twice, then barked, and nudged his hand with her bowling ball shaped head until he took the hint and scratched.

––––––––

“T
here’s not a single reason this has to happen.” Rogue looked back and forth between King, Stone and Fury. “We’re the same blood, the same clan. Why not just suck up the fact that we don’t all look the same, and,” he turned to King for the last bit, “maybe there aren’t just two alphas, and get on with life?”

“Because we can’t,” King said with a snarl. “It isn’t right, and it isn’t us. And unless you’ve forgotten,
brother
,” he hissed, “we don’t have any reason to believe anything they’ve said.”

Rogue looked at his sworn brother, and then at Jill and Claire who were sitting off to the side, watching and confused, about what the two of them were doing. He couldn’t admit to her that he thought the two
other
alphas were imposters at best, and GlasCorp monstrosities sent to kill them at worst. Not with the way she and Claire had taken to one another. It was almost like the two of them had come to terms with each other existing far easier than had the bears. Which... okay, maybe wasn’t that hard to believe, come to think of it.

“What would you have of us?” Stone hissed between clenched teeth. “Fealty?”

Rogue stared at him for a moment. “I’m not sure what that means. I think you made it up. But also, no, I—listen, I need to tell you all something, and I’m not sure you’ll believe me.”

Listening to the exchange, Claire started chuckling, for which Rogue was vaguely grateful.

“The hell do you think he’s going to say?” Rogue heard her ask Jill, out of the side of her mouth.

Jill just smiled and shook her head.

“We are the alphas,” King asserted again, for what seemed to be the eighth or ninth time. “And you are untested youths who were raised in a cage.”

“Okay,” Rogue said, “that’s not exactly fair, it’s,” he trailed off remembering the way King had reacted when he finally woke up from the drug-induced stupor back at the lab. He’d been confused, disheveled, angry and distrustful, which was all fairly normal. But then, he’d attacked Rogue once, and then when that didn’t go very well, waited until he was asleep to try it again. That wasn’t like him – not at all. But at the time, Rogue thought maybe it was captivity stress.

“There’s more to the story,” Rogue said. “More to what happened. While you three were drugged out of your brains, I was taken to an office and showed the man who was behind all this.”

Eckert?
The thought crossed Claire’s mind, but it was absurd. He’d had his head bitten halfway off by Fury during their escape. She’d seen the tendons and flesh hanging there limply. She’d seen the mess he left.

“Someone named Eckert,” Rogue said. “He had a scarf or something wrapped around his throat. He kept asking strange questions and going on and on about things that made no sense. And,” he looked between the bears. “I’m guessing from the looks on your faces, you know who he is?”

“Was!” Stone growled, standing up and sweeping one of his feet backwards through the leaves. “Fury murdered him. He was our captor, he was the one who experimented on us so brutally, he’s the one who did such... horrible things... to the rest of the clan.”

There was a roughly softball-sized lump in Claire’s throat when he confirmed the awful truth. “But,” she stood up, too, “how’s that possible?”

“There were... whistles. Mechanical whistling noises, they came from his neck, you said?” Fury asked. Rage flashed in his eyes. “If I have to kill him a thousand times for him to stay dead, I’ll do it. And I’ll love every second of his suffering.”

“There’s something else, though,” Rogue said. “That soldier. I don’t know what to call him really. The black-clad gas mask wearing things. The one that took me to him seemed different from the rest. He was joking with me, or teasing me or something. Seemed like he had a mind, and the rest were just ants.”