Her complaining at herself quickly devolved into just regular old sobbing. After a few seconds, the sobbing gave way to shaking and then to the worse-than-crying silence that came when Jill’s throat was too raw to keep making noise, and her eyes were too puffy to make any more tears.
And then, the mark on her chest tingled again, almost like it was taunting her. She reached up and touched it, immediately reminded that everything was real. The pistol on her bed with the flattened bullet next to it on the nightstand did the same thing. Jill reached over and grabbed the crackled silver disc, turning it over in her fingers as the cold bit deep.
She watched the sun glint off the cracks, and turned her other hand over, watching the circle of shadow dance over her knuckles. For a moment, that entertained her, but then, the circle vanished and the entire room darkened.
“Storm?” she asked the empty room, turning around and poking two fingers through the blinds, peeking outside. Thick, heavy, carpet-like black clouds hung in the small space of sky visible from Jill’s cabin. As the rain started to fall, it felt to her like her tears were being externalized, like her sadness, her helpless feelings, taken outside and given to the weather instead of being buried in her heart.
Anything was better than the doubt being inside.
Thunder boomed, and a flash of lightning briefly lit the entire world.
On the table, her as-yet-unused shortwave radio fuzzed to life. It sounded like someone turning the dial, scanning through FM channels. Static interspersed with short bursts of sound issued from the single round speaker.
Another peal of thunder rattled the windows of the cabin. Another round of static, and then scanning noises came from the radio, but as she sat there listening to the slightly relaxing white noise, Jill heard something that sounded like voices. One voice at first, but then joined by a second. She thought maybe she was picking up a signal from the Forest Service, but the next words she heard chilled her bones.
“Gen... Draven,” a voice said. It was broken up by crackles in the airwaves, but the message was clear enough. “Draven ... you copy?”
“Draven here, ... copy,” came the response. “Orders? Any...change with ... orders?”
“Neg... to proceed as ordered. Give us ... we will collect. Repeat ... interact with bears.”
The last bit came through flawlessly. It was the older, more grizzled sounding voice. “Understood. Draven out.”
Suddenly, the peals of thunder and blasts of lightning felt more like they were punctuating panic than that they were an interesting diversion.
When the radio came in loud and clear for a second transmission, lightning always strikes twice occurred to Jill, and she laughed softly despite everything else. She took a deep breath, held it for a moment. With a long, heavy, weary sigh, she exhaled just as a voice called her.
“Home base calling Jill Appleton,” the voice said. It sounded familiar, but with the lack of clarity a radio broadcast gives, it was hard to tell.
“Fred?” she asked. “Is that you?”
“Calling Jill Apple—oh, Jill? I think you’re supposed to use words like ‘copy’ and ‘affirmative’ when you talk on these things.”
She giggled. Fred Stanton never was very good with communications technology. Molecular biology and virology? Yeah, he was the best in the world. But give the guy a cell phone and he froze up like a six-year-old caught with his pants down, about to pee into a jack-o-lantern on the neighbor’s porch.
“Sure, yes, I copy, Dr. Stanton. Loud and clear, I read you.”
“Huh?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “Jill?”
“Yeah, Fred,” she said, laughing. “I can hear you. Give me something nice to hear – after this morning, I could use it.”
“Oh,” he grumbled. “Things not going well? You’re not sick are you? Or hurt?”
“No, nothing like that. Just...”
I’m in love with two hunted bears. Oh also, I’m just getting over three werewolf attacks and killing two of them. While we’re at it, I’m pretty sure I’m the magically fated mate to those bears I mentioned earlier, and the bigger one was talking about getting me pregnant.
That’s what she wanted to say, anyway. God almighty it’d feel good to get that off my chest.
“Just frustrated with trying to find the bears,” is what she heard herself saying, and then she sighed again for lack of anything better to do.
Fred hummed audibly. He did that when he was worried, or upset about something. “Yeah,” he began. “That’s what I was supposed to contact you about.”
“Don’t tell me,” Jill said. “It’s only been a couple of weeks!”
“Two and a half, to be fair.”
“Okay, that’s a twenty-fifth of the time I was allotted. What the hell’s going on?”
Fred made that same, worried noise, again. “I know it’s ridiculous, and so do you. But, GlasCorp—”
“Fucking GlasCorp!” Jill cut in. “First they steal my thing in Yosemite, now they’re out here on a bear hunt. What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“First be quiet – don’t start in on the airwaves. God knows who’s listening. Now, hold on, did you just say ‘bear hunt’? What are you talking about? They’re hunting? Are you sure?”
She couldn’t tell him everything. Fred might be her close friend, her confidant and her mentor, but at some point you have to draw a line. This line, she decided, was going to be starkly between ‘shape shifting mates’ and everything else. Jill took a deep breath. “Okay, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but...”
For the next several minutes, she explained everything she’d overheard. She went on and on about the weirdness with the helicopters and the mysterious Draven, and all of that. Knowing full-well anyone could be listening to her, just like she listened to Draven, she avoided specifics, talking skillfully around the point enough to get it across, but only just.
She went right up to the line where she was going to start talking about the shape shifters, but pulled back at the last second, not wanting her boss to dismiss everything she just said by thinking she was a lunatic.
She was breathless by the time she finished, and for several moments, Fred was silent. “You still there?” she finally asked.
“Oh, uh, yeah. Sorry, I’m just trying to process all of that. And you’re sure they’re hunting?”
“I heard them on the radio,” Jill said. “About five minutes before you called. The thunder and lightning... I guess the storm screwed with their signal and I picked up pieces of it. And I definitely remember whoever it was calling this guy, Dra—” she caught herself. “Calling this guy a general. I don’t know if that’s just some sort of nickname or if he’s an actual army general or what.”
“I’d personally rather not even think about that,” he said. “I mean, I know better than to doubt what you heard, but at some point I have to start questioning what I can take on, you know?”
One man can’t fight against an army, the words Rogue said, rattled through Jill’s mind. Yeah, an army or an entire global, multinational corporate syndicate. “Yeah,” she said. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Fred said. “But it sounds less nuts than you’re probably thinking. I’m not one of those ‘it all adds up!’ sort of people, but, yeah, it—”
“Don’t say it,” Jill cut in, smiling. “As soon as this weather breaks, I’m going to go back out to keep hunting for my bears. You’re gonna poke around in the politics and see what you can see. Won’t be much different than any other time, right?”
Fred scoffed a laugh. “Right, keep your head down, you hear me?”
“Will do, boss. Will do.”
The radio squelched again, and then fuzzed back to white static. As it did, Jill slumped back into her chair, briefly considered jotting some notes, and then pushed the paper away too.
“Rain’s just water,” she said, standing up and finishing the shoe tying she began when this all started. “I’ll get wet, I’ll complain about it, I’ll get soggy socks, and then I’ll get over it. But if that shit about them hunting my bears is true, I’m not,” Jill caught herself, clamping her mouth shut and clenching her teeth at the same time.
“I guess I’m gonna be a damn mama bear is what I’m going to be. No one hurts my mates,” she said through gritted teeth. “Not some scumbag mercenaries or a greasy pharmaceutical company.”
She picked her .357 up off the bed, slowly rotated the cylinder and checked to make sure she had six loaded – and impeccably cleaned – chambers. Then, for lack of a better place to put it, she stuck the gun in her holster, which she tucked into her shorts. She made sure the safety was engaged, since she decided she’d prefer to stick with the standard butt configuration instead of adding a second hole.
“If they try? They’ll have to get through me first. Six feet of Jill that doesn’t seem all that big when you put her next to seven and a half feet of bear. But I’m still not gonna go down without a fight.”