“Madix?” King had asked, without much interest. “But why would he shoot you? It wouldn’t make sense for him to be involved in this. Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for him to be in a helicopter in the first place. Don’t you remember his fear of heights? One of the biggest, strongest bears in the clan, and he’d never go all the way up a tree, even for the biggest beehives. He’d always refuse to look down off of cliffs, he’d...”
King had fallen silent like remembering the past had become too much of an emotional burden for him just then. Rogue looked past the other alpha, out at the cubs below and tried to banish the thought that maybe it was Madix in that helicopter. Once his brother gave him the name, memories flooded the smaller bear, but none of them lined up.
Madix had scars, sure, we all do, but nothing like the guy in that chopper. And why would he shoot me? It hardly makes sense. That night, he had banished those memories with enough honeywine to kill a normal person – or any person really. But to him, there was almost no effect past a little bit of pleasant dizziness and a full night of sleep.
For a time – a blessed time, no matter how brief – the clan was normal. The cubs hunted and fished, Arrow gathered berries, Slate tried to sucker other bears into wrestling matches.
One day stretched into two and then into three before there was any hint that change was coming. On the third day, Rogue took off before light, to “see if the wolves had calmed.” King bid him farewell with a curt nod and a gaze that lingered slightly longer than normal. Something was bothering Rogue, but there was no telling what, exactly.
As Rogue left camp, his brother stood, thinking about calling after him, but then decided against it. If something was on Rogue’s mind, King knew he’d never get it out by asking. Rogue was never much for talking, especially about his own feelings. The older, bigger alpha remembered how Rogue took eight years before he shed a tear over the kidnappings.
King knew he hurt, he knew that his brother probably hurt more than anyone. Along with his deep, passionate connection to his animal nature, Rogue also seemed to feel everything more keenly and sharply than any of the other clan members. He never showed his emotions, or outwardly let them affect him, but despite his gruffness and rough, slightly vulgar attitude, King knew that if any one of their number was a poet, it’d be his sworn brother.
He scoffed a laugh, thinking of Rogue reciting some saccharine love poem. King though, he was no poet. He didn’t have the energy or the time, or... If he was being honest, the ability to feel the highs and lows of life the way Rogue did. Where Rogue was a tempest, King was a placid sea; if King was the calm, Rogue was the storm.
But it worked.
That’s how it always worked. Hot blood and cold mix to make better decisions. Impulse makes action, and quiet thought makes it useful.
Without one, there could never be the other. Hot and cold, soft and hard.
King watched Rogue as the younger bear shifted and disappeared into the woods. Without Rogue, there was no King. He sighed, heavily, waiting for the cubs to stir and the day to begin. Two are one in us, he thought, before shaking his head. No, not two. Now there are three.
Instead of a sigh, that thought brought a wave of warm fingers running out from the center of King’s chest and down his sides. Then, he smiled.
*
The afternoon sun overhead heated the forest to the point of dew steaming on the leaves. Rogue was hot, his fur a blanket of insulation that he wished he didn’t have, but he was thankful for his thick hide and coat keeping the briars from cutting into him, and keeping the leaves and sticks out of his eyes.
When he ran, he felt free. With every branch that snapped, every fallen trunk he cracked, he felt more alive, more at home.
King avoided shifting if he could. He said it made him lose control to some small degree, and of course, control was the one thing King wanted to keep at all times, at all costs. It wasn’t losing control for Rogue though, it was letting his instincts take over; it was letting his brain stop overanalyzing and calculating for a few precious moments.
And anyway, he found a long time before that his instincts were usually more trustworthy than his thoughts. Leave the strategies and the tactics to King. Rogue was at home with hot passion, at ease with the unreason.
A chopper, the sound throbbing through his body, gave Rogue a moment’s pause. It was close to the ground, he thought, even though he couldn’t locate it. With a canopy as dense as this one, the thing would have to go right overhead, and anyway, at the moment he was just a bear. A really big one, of a kind that wasn’t supposed to exist in these parts for a couple hundred years, but no normal person would know that.
That’s when the scent hit his nose.
Jill? You’re here?
The bear looked all around him, in something approaching a panic. Why was she here? What was she doing with a helicopter so close to the ground? She couldn’t be involved in any of this, could she?
Rogue shook his huge head, trying to calm his nerves. Carefully, he crept forward as the throb of helicopter blades grew slower, more even in pace. It had landed, and not far away.
Smelling the air again, the scent of Rogue’s mate had been subsumed by the stink of fuel, and the rotten aroma of – food?
Sure enough, in a clearing that he could barely see, Jill was approaching a helicopter, and having some kind of shouted small-talk conversation with the man inside. This chopper wasn’t like the ones Rogue had seen before. This one was a gentle color of green and had a very plain identification number stenciled onto the tail of the craft.
In the safety of his tree cover, Rogue watched his mate throw her brown hair back, and then pull it into a curly ponytail. Her long, slender form – which had a least a foot on the stocky, bearded man who hopped out to help her with the things he was handing off – drew a hot, longing breath from Rogue’s chest. He wanted her.
No, not want – he needed her, longed for her, ached to feel her skin against his, to explore the curve of her hips with his fingertips, to taste her, to caress her... to possess her.
But he couldn’t. Not right then. Rogue might be brazen and almost dangerously brash, but to charge out and sweep his mate up in his arms right in front of someone? That was a touch of crazy even Rogue didn’t have in him. For all he knew, Jill had been bound in a human marriage and this was her human mate – he didn’t know.
By the time Jill began to trek back into the woods, with her companion in tow, both of them loaded down with bags, packs and whatever else they were carrying, the day began to darken. Night was coming, and even though the lupines had been calm for two nights straight, that wouldn’t last forever. If he heard howls, he couldn’t stalk his mate, no matter how much he wanted. If howls came, he had to watch them, had to try his best to contain them.
When the first baleful moan broke through the slightly misty dusk, Rogue damned his luck.
Duty first, he thought, turning back toward the lupine pack den where he’d watched a butchering a few nights past. Duty first, love second.
Although, even as he loped along the path to where he knew he needed to go, he began to seriously question his priorities.
-10-
“Time to breathe. Just for a second.”
-Jill
Waking up, alone, in her own bed, was just about the last thing Jill expected. After being awakened two separate times by werewolves, and after a couple of really good, sweaty nights with those bears?
Nothing she could do took the bears off her mind. She’d considered running back to society... hell, she’d considered a lot of things.
But she knew she couldn’t do it. She knew this was where she belonged, that this forest, these bears, they were her family.
She rolled over, still a little sore from some injury or another she managed to sustain at the hands of a now-dead pile of wolf fluff. Otherwise? She was intact, she wasn’t hurt, and more – most? – importantly, she knew that all those things she had been dreaming? They weren’t just dreams.
She sighed, thinking back to those impossible nights, to Rogue and King, and the way they had seemed to be two souls in one body. Rogue with his easy smiles and worldly way of speaking and King with his immense power, his quiet confidence, and... well, and a sort of Tarzan-like way about him. They were two alphas, and Jill? Apparently just got herself two boyfriends so big they made her feel like a normal girl.
Boyfriends? Jeez. No, boyfriends don’t do the things they did. Boyfriends don’t talk about alpha marks, about mating and bearing baby bears, she chuckled to herself. And boyfriends usually don’t come onto me two at a time and make me...
Just about the only thing Jill knew for sure is that she’d never, not once in her life, screamed and writhed and pulsed and groaned like she had the night before. Then again, she’d never been with a pair of enormous werebears, either.
The sun was already burning hot in the Appalachian forest. Steam rose in gentle wisps from evaporating dew. She looked over to where the wolf had lay dead.
“Gone?” she asked the empty room. “Just like that?”
She stood up, cautiously approaching the exact spot the creature slumped over and disintegrated, like she expected something to hop up and grab her. None of the quicksilver fur, not even the bone, was left. Jill reached over and plucked the flattened bullet she found among the mess – she set it on the desk the night before, but hadn’t thought much about it until just then. She climbed out of bed, still holding the silvery disc, and stooped over, crouching down with her feet flat on the ground. When she did this she thought she probably looked a little like a slightly-gangly chimpanzee, all legs and arms, and all folded up. She’d been doing it since she was a little girl.