Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (3 page)

When it hit though, it hit her like a Mack truck right in the chest. “Shit,” she said, slightly breathless. “I have got to figure out some way for Eckert to let me stop working graveyards.”

That’s when she realized she hadn’t so much as
thought
about work since she called in the night before. Aside from being honest-to-God rested, not thinking about work? That was probably the second rarest thing in the world.

Cleo flopped over on the ground, pawing at the air and writhing back and forth until her distracted master finally took the hint and crouched in front of her jowly friend, scratching here and there, up and down her chest. When her fingernails got to the white fur on Cleo’s belly, the massive pit-bull started drooling a little, and chuffing happily, which was so wonderfully relaxing that for a moment, she’d almost totally forgot that in about ten hours, she’d be going straight back to GlasCorp.

That’s life, I guess. One escape at a time. Living for the trips, surviving for the next chance at being happy, even when it always seems like there’s no path through the darkness
.

“That’s, uh, profoundly dark,” she said to herself as she got up off the floor, and her left knee popped. “Not so sure why I have to be so angsty about working. Not like I do anything anyway.”

When it came down to it
that
is what she was so angsty about. There was no reason for her to exist, no point to her being there. Why the hell did some hot-shot researcher need to keep her under his thumb? Why was she – a Yale educated scientist – wandering around copying shit off of clipboards? She had credentials, she had legitimacy, and she was just squandering it all by sitting around and playing Sudoku for eight hours a night.

Twelve hours a night, more recently.

And for what? A paycheck? The numb sense that she had financial security?

If Eckert got fired, she’d be out the door too. She knew that, though she preferred not to dwell too heavily on that part of the wonderful world of experimental research. And then there was the fact that she had
not a clue
what the guy was working on. She didn’t even know what was in the labs she made rounds to and from, endlessly, as sure as night was dark and day was light.

The tingling began again, this time it was that same odd sensation from before, back at GlasCorp, when her birthmark had started up with the itching and tingling. She couldn’t place it, couldn’t explain it, and more than anything, she just really didn’t want to be thinking about anything right then.

So, she did the best thing she possibly could to distract herself: try to work up the courage to actually call that waiter for a date.

The whole thing made her feel so ridiculous, the entire show she put on, the torture she’d admittedly really enjoyed laying on her pal and the waiter, she felt a little stupid afterward. Then again, Alyssa
had
been right. The guy did stick around, and even laughed at himself a little. That kind of thing was rare enough to warrant at least a call. And if it ended up going somewhere?

Hell, Andy might be an idiot, but he
was
right about the part where she really did need someone to at least give her some distraction.

“’Lo?” someone with a huskier voice than Claire remembered, picked up. He cleared his throat away from the phone.

“Hey, uh... Nick?”

He cleared his throat again. “Oh, yeah, Nick. That’s me. Who—” then he caught himself. “Claire!”

That was more excitement than I expected. Then again, I can’t blame the dude after the show I put on last night. I’d probably been the highlight of his night with the nipple clamp thing
.

“Nipple clamps!”

Great
.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m glad that’s what you remembered.” Claire laughed softly since, honestly, she couldn’t blame him. “Listen, are you—”

“We’re going out,” he said. “No way in the world I’m missing out on a date with someone that made me laugh that hard. And no, it isn’t just because of the nipple clamp thing. You made my damn night.”

“Well,” Claire was still laughing, but at least he took it the right way. Before she could say anything else, he cut her off again.

“So when? Tonight? Tomorrow? Monday?”

“Let’s call it Monday, but the week after next. I’m not gonna be able to get out of work until then. And Nick?”

“Next Monday it is. What’s up?”

“Thanks for remembering me.”

He laughed. “How the hell could I not? See ya then. Text me your address?”

That felt better than she thought it was going to feel. She forgot how incredible it was when someone remembered her – but better than that? She forgot how good it felt for someone to
want
her.

This is going to be a hellishly long week
, Claire thought, as she sent her address to Nick.
But at least this time, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. A ginger light that turns red when he gets a hard-on
.

Smiling, she hooked Cleo up for a walk, and could hardly believe it when seven-thirty rolled around that night, and she had not
once
worried, fretted, or even though about killing Eckert.

Nothing at all could come from her date with Nick, and just that short relief he’d given her from the tension of life was worth a million bucks.

Worth a million
at least
.

––––––––

I
t had been a long, exceeding boring, week at GlasCorp.

Claire showed up dutifully every day, right at the scheduled time, and proceeded to do absolutely nothing until the next morning. Her birthmark kept tingling – oddly, more intensely each time she made her rounds down the elevator to lab B-3, which was strange but for once, Claire actually had a list of things to accomplish before the night was over.

Of course, she wasn’t actually
doing
any of them. Old habits die hard, and all that. So, she was perched at her desk on level 42, with her feet curled up underneath her in the chair, reading through some weird self-published conspiracy book she picked up for a buck twenty at the most recent “get this shit out of here, please” clearance sale at the Stanton public library. This one was a long, rambling account of some time travel experiment that supposedly happened in Montauk, New York, and also involved some kind of demons? She didn’t know, but damn if it wasn’t fascinating.

“Claire Redmon,” the voice droned over the PA before going slightly fuzzy. “Claire Redmon, please report to lab B-3. Claire Redmon to laboratory B-3. Dr. Eckert needs your help in lab B-3.”

“Jesus,” Claire sighed, throwing the old, crackly-covered paperback she was reading onto her desk. It was after hours – four hours after hours, to be exact – and she was getting
pretty
sick of Eckert, with his egg-shaped head that always seemed to sprout droplets of sweat, keeping her up all night for seemingly no reason.

She’d come in, she’d walk around locked up laboratories, none of which she could enter, and copied down whatever was on the clipboards on the doors. It was awful, it was boring, but what the hell.

It’s a job,
she thought.
A job I can do, and not think. A job I can walk straight into, sit around, get paid, and walk straight out of without taking one single shred of it home. Not like I have much to do outside of this place except worry about work, but... what the hell. Someday I’ll get all ambitious again and go out to change the world of science. Or... maybe not.

She sighed again as the voice on the PA called her again. She’d never actually met the person to whom the voice belonged, but it seemed to her that it didn’t matter very much. No one at GlasCorp had ever much paid attention to her. Then again, no one at GlasCorp headquarters – the seat of power for the country’s most wealthy pharmaceutical company – seemed to pay much attention to anyone else.

She began the long, slow, tedious trek to lab B-3.

The walk took about fourteen minutes, all told, including elevator and security check time. It took about eighteen if she stopped off at the food machine, which she was planning to do on this trip.

“I’m always one for a Honey Bun,” she said, in a strangely zen-like, meditative way as she strolled past lab H-10. These labs she could enter, and often did, to talk to the cute scientist named Beale. They’d go back and forth, he’d make some vaguely lewd joke, she’d pretend to be embarrassed, and then he’d go back to work and she’d go back to reading one of the many, many conspiracy theorist paperbacks she whiled away her free hours collecting. “Always up for a...”

She trailed off as something in H-3 screeched rather loudly. These were mouse labs, and nothing particularly strange happened in any of them. Cognitive experiments mostly – think mice running around in mazes for food prizes – certainly nothing that caused screeching like that.

Claire skidded to a halt, imagining all kinds of horrific things playing out in front of her as she went to her tiptoes and peered through the reinforced window, crisscrossed with a wire grid. She squinted, adjusted her glasses, and peered deep into the darkened office.

There it is again
. Another noise reached her ears. She pressed her nose flat against the glass, unable to see anything, but absolutely certain that at any second, some horror from another dimension was going to splat against the glass and then suck her brains out through her nose.

I need to stop reading those books
, she thought, chuckling as she kept staring.
If I can imagine things like that?

The screech sounded again – more of a squeal this time – but more distant.

Fog streaked the glass beneath her nostrils, and just as she had shaken her head and decided there was nothing to see,
something
glittered in the darkness

“What in the fu—”

Two eyes.

Two golden, shimmering eyes. “Eyes?” she asked no one at all. “What in the world?”

The sight was as unmistakable as it was impossible. Two golden eyes stared at her through the darkness for just a moment, then, as though they were blinking, they went dark, and vanished.

No more squeals, no more squeaking.

“No more eyes,” Claire intoned, shaking her head, stunned and confused. “I’m just gonna... you know what? I’m tired. I drink too much coffee. I probably just imagined that.”

As she turned and shambled the rest of the way to lab B-3, via the food machine, where she did get herself a Honey Bun, Claire just told herself over, and over, and over, that she’d imagined those eyes.

But in her heart? She knew they were as real as the delicious treat crinkling in the wrapper that she stuffed in her pocket, because she forgot to eat it before the elevator dumped her out in the depths of the building, right in front of lab B-3. The first thing she noticed was that the cold, sterile, pulsing white of the florescent lamps wasn’t present.

Nothing, she noticed, was present. The whole area was pitch black, and as the elevator’s door slid open, her first instinct was to recoil and mash the button to go right the hell back to her office.

Both sides of the security check were open, and no guard was standing sentinel.
Something is very, very wrong
.

This door? This had
never
been open. The problem about a curious mind is that it just never can quite force itself to
not
be curious. No amount of reason was going to stop Claire from at least trying to understand the strange sitaution.

“Hello?” Claire called into the darkness. The hauntingly silent darkness that seemed to overwhelm her senses and suck everything into itself stood, gaping, like a maw opening into a black hole. “Anyone in there? Dr. Eckert?”

No answer. As she reached into the lab, the darkness was almost palpable, like the membrane of a jellyfish as she plumbed the depths with groping fingers. The air inside was somehow colder than the air without. A chill ran up her arm, followed by a flush of goosebumps that prickled the skin of her neck and all down her back.

“Hello? Dr. Eckert? Anyone in here? Sam?” Sam was the security guard who usually handed her the clipboard for note taking. It all seemed like pointless busywork, but as the door swung free on its hinges, and she flicked on her phone for the little light she could get out of her flashlight app, she suddenly missed the busywork.

Her footfall echoed off the sterile walls. Turning her light to the nearest one, revealed a whiteboard with some notes jotted down – Dr. Eckert was to come at eight this evening, Dr. Stanley would relieve him at midnight. Whatever was in here had been fed four times today, and was scheduled for four more.

Claire’s thoughts turned back to those eyes shimmering in the darkness in the instant before they vanished back in the mouse lab. She remembered the screeching and wondered – briefly – if that was less a screech and more a scream?

“What was that?” A sound drew her immediate attention. She whirled on her toes, trying to pierce the darkness with her phone. “Who’s there?”

A long, slow, almost leisurely scratching sound sent the hair on the back of Claire’s neck into a full-attention stand. She tightened her lips and narrowed her eyes in concentration, as though that would break the tension, the darkness.

Another scratching sound, behind her this time.

“Hello? Stop messing around, whoever you are. I was called to come down here to see you, Dr. Eckert, where are you?”

Messing around,
she thought with a humorless laugh.
No one’s ever messed around here. And especially not like this.

She began to back away, as good sense overtook her obnoxious curiosity.
I need to get help, call the police, call the army, something.

Claire found when she began to back away that she’d walked further into the lab than she realized. But still she stared straight ahead, unable to contain the sense of fascination that drew her to this work in the first place. A PhD in molecular biology got her all the way to a desk job that bored her to tears, but still she was curious, thirsty for knowledge. On the weekends, she usually picked a cave system somewhere and went exploring. This wasn’t any different, except yeah, no, it was completely, totally different in every conceivable way.