Two Bears are Better Than One(14)

Blinding, intense, white-hot light flooded the forest where the two alphas stood. Rogue shielded his eyes, stunned momentarily.

King backhanded his brother, snapping him back to reality. “Run!” he shouted. “Quickly!”

Their dash into the forest began with one brother dragging the second, but moments later, Rogue came back to himself. The two ran as men at first, then went to the ground as bears, shouldering through the thick, prickly undergrowth.

The wolves had stopped howling. All the noise, in fact, had stopped. The throbbing, whipping chopper blades seemed to fall silent. The whole forest was silent.

As they ran, generally in the direction of the clan camp, they whizzed by Jill’s cabin. “King!” Rogue shouted. “We can’t leave her!”

King nodded, but he looked distracted.

Rogue laughed bitterly, wiping blood from the corner of his mouth. Most of his wounds were closing, but the claw marks running down the side of his face still stung each time air kissed his broken skin.

“What was that?” King interrupted him, placing a hand on his brother’s chest. “Listen.”

Rustling leaves, crackling branches and roots. Something approached the modest cabin, something much closer to it than were the two bears. A faint whining sound met their ears. “A lupine?” King hissed. “How?”

The answer didn’t matter.

A snarl came first, and then the sound of shattering glass.

And then a scream.





-8-


“Seen one pile of fluff dust, seen ‘em all.”


-Jill


“Get back!” Jill hissed, rolling off her bed and backing against the cabin wall.

This went a lot better than the first time she stared down a werewolf. She was actually feeling pretty good about how action movie-esque her moves were.

The smooth wood warmed her naked back, and her hands trembled slightly, gripping the pistol. She took a deep breath, steadying herself, steeling her nerves. The overhead fan was going, throwing cool breeze down across Jill’s bare body.

She always slept naked, especially when it was so humid that just standing up was enough exertion to get her sweating. It wasn’t every day that she was awakened an hour after going to sleep by a wolf crashing through her window.

I wonder if the National Geographic Society will give me a prize for finding a clan of werebears, and reducing the local feral werewolf population?

She laughed bitterly as the silver backed wolf hunched its shoulders and dropped his head in a silent gesture of aggression. He pulled his lips back over his teeth, baring yellow daggers as long as Jill’s fingers.

Tightening her grip, she slid her finger from the side of the pistol to the trigger. “I’ll blow your damn brains out,” she hissed. “Don’t try me. I did it to your friend. You know I did, don’t you?”

The wolf crept forward, testing her resolve. His eyes were orange – the kind that comes from a flame licking against the side of a fireplace. Jill relaxed her fingers and gripped again. “One more step,” she said as she tried to back away again, but remembered the wall when she couldn’t. “Don’t try it.”

She knew the wolf understood. That was the strangest thing. Well okay, the first strange thing was that a wolf dove through her goddamn window in the middle of the night, alone, like it had gone insane.

Jill narrowed her eyes, sighting the end of the gun straight at the middle of the monster’s chest. This thing was about double the size of a normal wolf, and much more thickly muscled around the neck and shoulders.

“You... wouldn’t,” Jill thought she heard.

“Did you just talk? What in the actual fuck.”

“You’re in... a new world,” the creature moaned. The voice was scratchy and pained, as though it hadn’t been used in quite some time. “Leave.”

Her hands went right back to shaking. Jill closed her eyes tight as a drop of sweat ran down from her temple to her chin, and then dripped to the floor, even though it was slightly cool in the cabin.

Partly from physical sensation, and partly from adrenaline, her senses were flaring. She heard more clearly, felt the cool air against her nipples with a swirling, irritating, thrilling sweetness. The wolf crept one step closer. He wasn’t going to turn around, she knew. It was quickly becoming a battle of wills.

“No,” Jill said out loud. “You leave.”

She shook her head, banishing thoughts of Rogue and King. No time to think about the bears, no time to rest on her laurels, hoping her mates would come to save her. Jill was staring down an insane wolf, and he wasn’t going to wait.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked when she saw him twitch to the side. He shook his head like a dog with a bunch of mosquito bites, scrunching up his face for a moment and then shaking again. One of the wolf’s legs trembled, and then as soon as his tremor had started, it was done.

“Wrong... with me?” the wolf made some kind of guttural noise that vaguely resembled a mocking laugh. “Noth...nothing.”

“You’re twitching.”

She slid along the wall, stalling for time. “And you know I’m serious. Keep coming and you’re gonna get a bullet in your throat.”

“You,” his throat clicked. “You haven’t... yet,” he snarled, taking another step forward.

Jill stuck her lip between her teeth, biting down until the pain sharpened her attention. “I don’t want to do this,” she said, her voice a hiss between her teeth. “Just go.”

“Your bears aren’t here to save you, girl.” His speech came easier, thought it was still halting, gravelly and scratchy when he spoke. “Only me, and—”

He took another step.

That was one step too many.

Squinting and readying herself for the blast and the recoil, Jill squeezed the trigger.

One determined flash, one explosion of light and smoke and sound, and the wolf howled, screeched, and reeled backward from the impact. He scratched at the ground. Jill’s chest heaved with adrenaline. She took a deep breath, then a second, and a third. Each time her heart seemed to slow, time seemed to dilate.

And then, before her eyes, the lupine creature began to... unwind. His legs grew longer and thicker, his arms did the same. The fur on his neck and back receded. Moments later, the thing on the floor was no longer fully wolf, but a twisted combination of man and canine.

She stared, horrified, at what she’d done, even though she knew it wasn’t a choice she’d made, but a choice that had been forced on her.

The twisted creature dried out, right before her eyes. Seconds later, he began to crumble, and then was shortly nothing more than a pile of fluffy, speckled, gray and white ash.

She sat back, falling into a limp seated position on her thin mattress. Wide-eyed, she stared at the corpse on the ground and very carefully set the pistol on top of her desk. The sounds outside were growing closer by the moment. She only hoped that whatever was making them wasn’t something else she’d have to shoot.

I can’t... I had to. I did what I had to do, and that’s all there is to it. There wasn’t a choice. Am I in their territory? Does such a thing even exist out here?

A shiver ran through Jill’s body, from her neck to her toes. When it finished a wave of warmth radiated from out of her core, and on the tail of the tingling sensation came tears.

“I didn’t want to kill you,” she said, sniffing. “You made me do it. You wouldn’t stop, you kept coming. I told you I’d do it, I—”

“She’s here,” she heard Rogue’s voice come from outside the door.

“And safe,” King added as he opened the door. “You gave her silver?”

Rogue nodded to his brother and both men crossed the room when they saw the terror on Jill’s face, and noticed her naked vulnerability. “I didn’t,” she started and then trailed off. “I didn’t want to, he...”

King clutched her against his chest, Rogue ran a hand down her back, curling his fingers against her prickled flesh. “You had no choice,” he said in his smooth, calming way. “Something has driven the lupines insane. They think you’re in their territory, or—”

The two alphas exchanged a glance, and King shook his head. Rogue fell silent.

“They do that?” Jill asked. “I had no idea any of this even existed. I had no idea I was wandering into a warzone.”

She opened her eyes, staring first into Rogue’s ocean blue eye and then King’s burning green. “I thought I was just gonna come out here, watch some bears, get some ticks, and write a book. I didn’t—”

“You saved lives,” King said, in his short, but still somehow caring way. “You might not know it, but when you are strong, the lupines respect it, no matter their insanity.”

“He just vanished,” she said with a gulp. “He’s just dust. But that other one, he didn’t do the turning-into-a-guy thing.”

King nodded. “They do that,” he said.

“People wonder why they’ve never caught one, or found a body?” Rogue added. “That’s why. They don’t leave bodies. The creatures are so wretched, so cursed, that when they are freed from life, their souls ache to leave. They go in such a rush that it dries them out, and then... well, there you have it.” He poked the pile of dust with the toe of his boot.