“Slate!” King shouted as one of the adolescent werebears grew unruly and surprised his older brother with a sucker punch as the older one stood in a stream, waiting with a paw cocked in the air for a trout. “Let your brother hunt!”
“Yes, Alpha,” the smaller bear – so small he had yet to earn his tattoos – said, slinking back to the rest of the clan.
A smile crossed King’s bowed lips as he watched the younger cubs play, and the older ones hunt. One of the adolescent bears, called Arrow, sauntered into the middle of the makeshift camp and shrugged a sheet off his massive neck before shifting back into a lithe, long human. “Berries!” he announced. “Fresh, black and blues. I found a new clutch of bushes a half hour from here. I hope we can stay here awhile, at least until the berries are gone.” He looked in King’s direction.
The young bear had gotten his tattoos five years back, and was born with the mark of a Broken Pine alpha: one amber eye, to go along with his other one. He was the closest thing King and Rogue had to an heir, except another one had never been born. Tradition held that there were always two alphas, each with one amber eye, which made the clan whole. For King, the traditions and history of the clan were all that mattered.
For Rogue? Not so much.
“Get up, you old, fat bear! You’re going to sit there until you turn into a toad.”
Rogue mounted the last step into the alpha’s cave. Everywhere they camped, there was an overlooking space, just like this one. Behind them, the cave wound in a labyrinth, where they’d all sleep if the weather was bad, or there were lupines – the werewolves who had no order, they were just wild – making problems.
Oh, King thought. There he is, right on cue. Despite himself, the older – and not at all fat or in any way toad-like – bear, hopped to his knees and then his feet, and grabbed the second alpha by the forearm in a traditional greeting. For his part, Rogue insisted on a simple handshake followed by a hug afterwards.
For a few moments, the two alphas stared into each other’s eyes. Both of them had the Broken Pine alpha’s mark – one amber eye, and one of a different color. Rogue’s was dark blue, the color of a stormy ocean. King’s bright, burning green. Both of them were enormously tall, although King was slightly taller. But what he lacked in height, Rogue made up for in raw power. The muscles of his shoulders and neck flexed with every move he made. His chest tightened and relaxed with every breath he took.
The other thing? They saw the world in a completely different way.
King celebrated the old, Rogue the new; King treasured the memories he held of past times, and Rogue found them dusty and useless to the point of endangering the future of the clan. From King’s perspective, the only thing keeping the clan together and alive was tradition. Once that was gone, there’d be nothing left.
The generation before King and Rogue took over was a normal one. As normal as all those before, for as long as the clan had a history, either written or otherwise. But then tragedy struck. The women were taken by some shadowy force that never quite made sense. They swept in with their helicopters, like cowardly thieves in the night, and took everyone they could.
Bears had shifted, had fought like hell itself unleashed, but in the end, the strange humans in their slick black suits, with their electrified nets and shock sticks and relentless numbers, won out. That all happened only months after Rogue and King were named successor alphas. They knew from the start that their road would be a hard one.
Rogue’s way was to embrace change. King’s was to hunker down.
King shook his massive head, bringing himself back to reality. “How was the ranging? Anything to worry about?”
Rogue laughed, curling the left corner of his mouth in a mischievous smirk. “There’s always something to worry about, King. But right now, things are at peace. Although, while I was out in the wild world of the mountains, I thought about something.”
“You didn’t go into one of those human towns and drink them dry again, did you?” King smiled as he asked. He already knew the answer.
“No, of course not. Not completely dry, anyway. But when I was most of the way through their supply Fat Tire, a thought occurred to me, and I might be stupid, but—”
King snorted a laugh. “You were eating tires?” Rogue grinned, and sighed. “It’s beer. It’s delicious.”
“They make beer out of tires? Why would anyone drink that?”
Rogue heaved a heavy sigh. “As I was saying, there is a whole hell of a lot of country out there. Why do we have to stay here?”
“The clan’s rites, Rogue,” King said with a sigh. “You know this. We’ve been over it before. We’ve been over it as many times as you’ve gone ranging and gotten drunk.”
Rogue shook his head. “This time it wasn’t like that. The craft beers, you know, they have this sort of heaviness to them. You can’t drink as many as you can of the other things. Fills me up and makes me feel bloated and confused the next morning.”
A very patient look passed over King’s face. “And?”
“And,” the younger alpha – but only by a couple of years – said excitedly, “there’s no reason we can’t go out into the world, either pack up the clan and go somewhere else, or,” he trailed off.
A deep breath filled the older alpha’s bare, tattooed chest. The beads around his throat tightened as the muscles of his neck swelled slightly, and then relaxed. “The rituals, Rogue. They’re—”
“They’re useless ideas,” Rogue interjected, twisting his black hair into a knot and binding it with a length of string. “They’re keeping us in a place where we have no future. None of them do anything, anyway. We could prance around naked for hours, baking in the sun, and it wouldn’t make our mates return. But if we go out? If we look?”
“Then we die,” King shot back. “We’re so few, if ever we are found by whatever that shadow agency was that took our mates? If ever we settle, what happens then? We’re just sitting and waiting to be found, and once we are? What is it you think will happen?”
Rogue looked down at the ground, grinding the toe of a boot into the sidewall of the cave, leaving a white scratch. “I think we can’t keep running forever,” Rogue said. “I think our pack is already dying, I—”
“Clan,” King said.
“Ugh, clan, pack, what’s the difference?”
“Packs are for wolves. They’re savage and wild. Clans have tattoos, we have traditions.”
Rogue threw his hands up in the air, exasperated. “Traditions! Listen to this!”
“You’re hung over, Rogue,” King said, trying to bait the other alpha into anger. “You’re not thinking straight.”
Rogue narrowed his eyes to slits, his rage boiling over. Before long, hair would start coming out of his pores. “First of all I’m not hung over. Second? The clan, pack, whatever, is dying, and all your traditions haven’t done a fucking thing!”
King, reacting to some unseen force, touched the mark on his chest, and Rogue felt the twinge of heat as well. Both of them froze. “You too?” King asked.
Rogue nodded.
Of all the traditions and folkways of the clan, the mark was the only one Rogue believed in, and that was only because he could see it, and feel it, and didn’t actually have to do much believing.
“What is it?” Rogue asked. “Why is this happening so often these days? You don’t think...”
King gave him a glance that even the slightly wilder bear could read. The two turned, looking out of the mouth of the cave, down at the cubs who were silently staring at them. Arrow was no longer gorging on his berries. Slate was no longer trying to figure out a way to sucker punch his brother.
“Why do they always listen to us?” Rogue asked out the side of his mouth as a storm cloud gathered on the horizon.
“Because you always yell,” King said, a slight smile crossing his lips.
Rogue grunted and couldn’t help smiling too. “I only yell when I have good points to make.”
King gave him a sidelong glance as the two alphas moved to the mouth of their cave. “Welcome your alpha home, cubs,” King said with a booming voice. “He reports there’s nothing on the horizon. For now, we stay. Tonight we eat and drink and dance.”
A general cheer passed through the camp, but before long, the youthful bears all returned to their different activities. For a long moment, the co-alphas watched the clan going about their business.
All boys, all too young for tattoos except for Arrow and his slightly younger, and un-marked brother, River, who was named for all the time he spent standing in the water, catching fish with his bare hands.
Rogue clenched his jaws and swallowed hard. “We have to do something.”
They were both thinking the same thing.
“But what?” King asked. “If we stop running, we die. If we keep running, we—”
“Take slightly longer to die, and it just happens when we’re old and useless instead of young and strong and able to,” he trailed off.
“No,” King said, shaking his head. “We’re not fighting again. Not now, not ever. Fighting is what got us into this in the first place.”