Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (20 page)

“Yeah, you think?” Claire laughed, though bitterly, and got back up off her stump-seat. “Or hey maybe, you could, I dunno, pretend to give a shit about something other than your weird fetish with acting as serious as possible all the time? And, maybe – just maybe – that could involve cluing me in on some tiny part of what’s going on right now? With me? Remember, I just fell into this weird world a few weeks ago. You’re already writing my curiosity off like I’m an idiot for even having it.”

It was Fury’s turn to be in command. “I don’t know,” he said, with honesty that Claire hadn’t much expected. “I just don’t know. Stone doesn’t either, no matter what he says. He’s as lost as I am, and that’s why I wish we could just... well, like you said – get over all this shit, and act like grownups.”

A month passed, then two. There wasn’t anything that changed with Claire, or with the bears, except that every time they shifted to go somewhere, she did too – albeit slowly and with a lot of confusion, and frequently with some embarrassing clothes accidents. They got braver, brasher. Eventually, that meant they even went back to her little house so she could get some clothes and even got a few of Cleo’s toys and let her sleep in her own bed for one night.

They couldn’t stay any longer though. There was too much fear of being found out. Though they
did
stop off at a Walmart to pick up a slightly crappy replacement for her phone. Luckily she’d had the presence of mind to salvage the SIM from her old smashed one.

That was the worst part, really. The fear, the not knowing.

Claire lived most of her life before the bears in fear from one thing or another. Now, at least, she thought, she knew what she was afraid of.

Then again, it had been two months where she’d just been running. No one had called her, no one had tried to find her. At least, if they had, she didn’t know about it. That was maybe worse than anything. Being an anonymous shadow, just wrapped up in a new world where no one cared or wondered. But, she asked herself, how often did anyone care or wonder while she was back in reality? How often did she get exciting invitations or phone calls to go out to exotic restaurants or wild parties before?

The answer was almost as awful as her current fear – not very often at all.

Still, the fact that she never called Nick – cute little ginger-headed Nick – bothered her. She wanted to do it, to get in touch with him, if nothing else, so he’d know that she didn’t skip out on him because of anything to do with
him
. She remembered that sort of thing happening to her, and didn’t want to make anyone feel that same sinking, acidic, hopeless feeling of being left alone for no good reason.

So one day, she did just that.

The phone clicked as though it was going to reject her call with yet another “this call has no tower to take it” message, but then a few seconds later, the goddamn thing started to ring.

Claire sat up, back comfortably straight against a tree stump, and stared straight ahead. It was an early morning – a very early one. The sun hadn’t risen yet, nor had either of the bears who had been her constant companion-slash-kidnappers. She didn’t blame them – she knew why they were doing what they did – but that didn’t make it any better.

She smiled because something normal was happening. Something that felt like a thing people did. She was so tired of running through branches and hiding under big lumps of humus every single time a helicopter whirred overhead. She didn’t even know
why
they were hiding. After all, it had been months since the last attack, and just as long since they’d parted ways with the other bears, and with Jill.

God, she missed Jill. That was the first person who seemed to really
get
Claire Redmon.

It seemed silly now, sitting out in the middle of the woods and buzzing a guy she skipped a date with two months before, but every bit of normality made her feel a little better. Claire had forgotten all about the wild, horrific feeling of being a murderer after she was told that the guy that Fury and Stone were supposed to have ripped ear from ear lived. So now, here she was, wondering what the hell was going to come next.

“Uh... hello?”

The voice came through the receiver, unsure and shaking, and obviously asleep. “Dad?”

I wonder if there’s something wrong with his dad. I mean, why else would he answer a call at... four in the morning asking that? Ugh, why can’t I just calm down?

“No,” Claire said with a little giggle. “Sorry, I have the wrong—“

“Oh, shit,” Nick said. “I can’t remember your name but I sure as hell remember
you
.”

Claire blushed, even though she was at least two hundred miles away from the guy, and any embarrassment she had was one-hundred-percent, completely and totally lost. “You... do?”

Nick made a sort of chuffing, scoffing sound. “You stood me up,” he said. “I mean, it wasn’t the first time I got stiffed for a date, but for some reason, this one didn’t make me mad. I figured you just had something important to do and got all caught up in it. I heard you guys talking about your job. Seems like a hell of a serious thing, with all the experiments and the door guards who don’t let anything through. Am I right?”

Claire shifted her weight from one hip to the other, and took a long drink from the canteen she’d filled the night before. “You’d never believe me if I told you,” she said with a smile.

Here’s the thing – she didn’t feel anything for Nick. Not after Stone and Fury. She didn’t feel like she was interested in him, or like she needed him, or anything like that. Except... in a way, she did. She
did
need the normal guy, the friendly guy, the silly waiter with the ginger hair and the freckles that she’d embarrassed with all the sex talk and the nipple clamps.

This isn’t copper I’m smelling,
Claire thought, remembering the way Eckert’s sour sweat had tasted in the back of her throat the moment before Fury ripped his neck open.
This is a different kind of... cleaner? Pine-Sol? Why would I smell that?

“Are you right?” she asked as her thoughts trailed away from the conversation. A bird flitted past and she snapped back. “Oh, uh, yeah. There was a lot going on.”

He laughed again. This guy was a real good sport for half past four. Or maybe he was just
that
desperate that he’d remember her two months later and be willing to take a call at such a stupid hour. Somehow though, she didn’t think so. Somehow, she felt that something wasn’t quite that simple.

Claire took a deep breath before she responded, and something in the air caught her nose. She sniffled, she snorted, and then unleashed a massive, almost unbelievably loud, sneeze.

Fury stirred. Stone rolled over, pulling the tattered blanket tight around his shoulders.

But neither of them woke. Neither came to. They both just shifted a little, then went right on snoring again.

“How much are you willing to believe?” Claire asked. “And I mean that I’ve got a real fucking whopper for you.”

Nick let a long, droning, humming sound escape his throat. “Depends on what you’re going to tell me. Is this going to be an abduction story? Because I should probably tell you right now that I don’t much believe in that stuff. I mean, I’m fine with aliens and whatever, but abduction stories always leave me wondering if I’ve had my wallet stolen.”

Why is he talking to me? Why would someone I saw for exactly eighty seconds of my life, care enough to talk to me like this? And why does he sound so interested?

“What do you mean, wallet stolen?”
I’ll just do what I do best – distract him and myself both with questions that don’t mean a goddamn thing.

“You know,” he said. “Like someone took me for a ride. The abduction stories,” he yawned, and from the way he quickly tried to stop himself from doing so, he didn’t mean to have done it. “Sorry, the stories about abductions, they always leave me feeling like someone’s trying to sell me some class one bullshit.”

Claire considered what he’d said for a moment, especially in light of the fact that she, first off, hadn’t mentioned aliens at all, and second off, actually
had
been abducted, sort of, even if she wasn’t particularly wanting to be saved from her captors. Or... had she been kidnapped? They
had
given her a choice of going with them or not. Their words still echoed in her ears –
come with us, we can’t protect you otherwise –
as she had cried out to be either saved or taken away from all the carnage and the terror.

Of course, as hours turned into days, she’d stopped worrying so much about all that. And then when she found out Eckert was somehow still alive? Yeah, none of it mattered one damn whit. That’s what her dad always said instead of “shit”.

“No,” she said. “I wasn’t abducted by anything. And I don’t really know how to say this, but I’m sorry I never called.”

He made a clicking sound. It was like he slapped his tongue against the back of his teeth. “Sorry?” he asked. “I gotta be honest. I’ve never had someone not call me for two months, and then call and apologize for not calling me.”

Both of them laughed at the same time.

“You asked if I had been pulled away on something important?” she asked.

“Yeah, I mean, some weird, secretive work project. I heard you guys talking about working at GlasCorp. I know that place is pretty...” he whistled
The Twilight Zone
theme music to make his point instead of bothering with words.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I’ve read some stuff, heard some things. I mean,” Nick had fully woken up by then. His voice perked up, and he no longer sounded like a sleepy frog. “I mean, everyone’s heard the stories, right? I figured you were just on some secret project and not allowed to talk to anyone until it was over.”

His innocent naiveté just about stunned Claire as she sat on a stump, staring at the first fiery fingers of dawn. Along the ridge where she and Fury and Stone had settled in to an uneasy camp, the side of a mountain fell away in a sheer cliff. They’d wandered far and wide, but this was the most off-the-grid, wilderness-surrounded place they’d ever been. And that’s saying quite a bit for a threesome who had been in the deep woods.

This was the sort of place regular bears came through every so often.

Of course, those weren’t much of an issue, given the circumstances.

“Nothing important,” she said with a grin. “No, nothing like that. I just... I lost track of time is all. I don’t know how else to explain it. I was one place, and then I was another. Kinda like a blackout except it lasted for two months.”

“Then,” he paused for a second. A brief, but courteous second, because this was when he was going to drop the bomb. “Why the hell did you wait two months to call me?”

It wasn’t an atom bomb, because it didn’t destroy like eight square miles around her.

But damn if that question did make one hell of a mess in Claire Redmon’s brain.

She looked at her phone – eighteen percent still left in super power saver mode – and clicked to end the call. She hated it when she did, she felt like she was abandoning the last friend she’d had. Except the irony of the whole thing is that Nick was the only person who apparently remembered her, and also had no idea who she actually was.

He cared more about her than her drinking buddies, or her co-workers. He cared more than her parents – who hadn’t called her since two weeks
before
the grand disappearance – and it was all because he just liked her smile.

Simple things. Easy things. Honest things.

If I’m going to give myself up to this, I have to really give myself up to it. I have everything I need right here. The old world, the old me... they’re gone.

The next sounds Claire heard – wind howling through trees, birds defiantly singing, and Fury snoring like a buzzsaw – reassured her that she’d made the right decision.

––––––––

T
hey woke, not to the sound of birds chirping and little frogs croaking, but to helicopter blades.

It was a sound that Claire hadn’t heard in weeks – and one she wished she could go the rest of her life never having to hear again.

The first thought Fury and Stone had was to begin a treacherous descent along a fairly jagged rocky wall. At the bottom of the climb was a riverbed with a healthy pile of dead leaves, which they clambered underneath as the chopper circled overhead.

For a second, Claire had the vague hope that Jacques and Draven found them, and they were going to finally convince the other two bears that maybe this weird clan war wasn’t the best course of action. But instead of friendly shouts, the blades just churned off into the distance.

“Do you think that... maybe it’s them? Maybe it’s Jill and the bears? Jacques?”

She looked over to Fury, his eyes hard and his mouth a solid, grim line. His response was an angry grumble.

“Why can’t we just go look for them?” she asked.

His arm was around her shoulders, warming her skin against the winter chill. He pulled her tight, looked at her for a moment before kissing her forehead, and then sighed. “You know why,” he said.

On the other side of Claire, Stone ran a thumb down to the nape of her neck, and kissed her sweetly on the inside of her elbow. “We can’t,” he whispered. “It’s the way we have to follow.”

“Yeah,” Fury said with another sigh. “There you go. If you ever start wondering again, you’ve got a ready-packed answer. “We can’t because we can’t. But I’m wondering something a little more important – why have the helicopters suddenly picked up again? It’s been weeks since we saw one.”

Claire wasn’t about to admit that she’d used her phone again in those early morning hours before anyone else stirred. She wasn’t about to admit that she’d done anything wrong – partially because she didn’t’ think she had, not deep down in her heart, and partially because she didn’t know how the hell she
could
have done anything wrong. Especially not how she could have called down a bunch of helicopters on them. GlasCorp had plenty of resources and plenty of men, sure, but magic? That was one thing they couldn’t quite manage.