Two Bears are Better Than One(4)

“If we’d laid down when the men in black came, we’d all be gone. Dead, just like the others.”

“They’re not dead,” King said.

“Right,” the other alpha answered. “They’re either dead, or worse. Experimented on? Fiddled with? Rooted around in? Would you rather have that than our freedom?”

The words hit home, and hard. King sucked his bottom lip into his mouth and dragged his teeth along the auburn stubble. He didn’t respond, instead just watching out over the clearing, staring at the youths, none of whom were his by blood.

Afternoon’s burning, sweltering yellow sun dipped low behind the mountains and shifted slowly into the warm, hypnotic orange of early evening. As it did, the two alphas watched the cubs prepare camp, and begin to cook the evening meal.

Today’s had a lot of berries.

A lot.

Finally, after what felt to both men like hours of silence, Rogue spoke. “The winds are changing, brother,” he said. The alphas called each other brother by tradition – that was the one Rogue didn’t mind sticking to – not because of any relation. They were brothers in clan leadership, and brothers in war, friendship, and everything else except blood. “I haven’t felt my mark twitch like that since, well, I don’t remember the last time.”

King listened and then turned his face back to overlooking the camp. He spoke in slow, deliberate words, his voice a low rumble in his mighty chest. “I know,” he said simply. “It was before they were taken. But I don’t know what it means. Could it be that someone has gotten free and made their way back home?”

“Don’t get my hopes up,” Rogue said, kicking a rock that bounced down the face of the short cliff outside the cave. “It isn’t possible. Elsa, and all the rest of them, they’re gone. It’s time we move on.”

Elsa was their mate. Clan bears mated for life, and alphas were always two for each mate. It was so that no one knew which of the bloodlines bore children, and so bloodlines mattered less than clan.

Then again, Rogue had always been slightly irritated about that, too.

“Then what was it? You’re so sure you know the world, so tell me, brother, why did our alpha’s marks start burning and our muscles start clenching and our skin go prickly? What happened, if not a mate coming near?”

Rogue took a deep breath and popped one of the bursting-with-juice blackberries Arrow had brought them shortly after his return into his mouth. He chewed, sweet and tart fruit bursting between his teeth as he did. “You should try one,” he said, offering a handful to his sworn brother, who took a few and ate them all at once.

“Will you leave again?” King asked. “Or stay this time?”

Looking over at the older alpha with the slight tinge of gray in his auburn hair, Rogue opened his mouth to answer, and then reconsidered momentarily. “What is it?” King asked.

“I have to go. I have to search, to keep looking. You’re the leader, we both know that.”

“But you’re the fighter,” King said, nodding slowly. “You’re the last brave.” He shrugged. “That’s worth more than a leader who sits around and does nothing but take the clan from place to place every so often. Even if you won’t keep the traditions.”

“I have to look for her,” Rogue said, surprising King. “If someone is out there that we both felt, then she’s real. We have to find out who it is, and take her away from danger. Keep her from the men in black. If she got away from them,” he gritted his teeth. “If she escaped, then they’ll be tracking her. If she’s somehow another?”

“Another?” King asked, arching an eyebrow.

“We’re not the only ones of our kind. You know that. We could easily feel someone else wandering into our territory. Someone fated for us, somehow.”

King laughed bitterly. “I’m sure that’s it. A thousand years, maybe more, of us surviving in these woods alone, barely keeping ourselves alive, running and running until there was nowhere left to run. And finally one of the other clans finally comes into contact with us. Face it brother, we don’t know if the other clans even exist, at least outside of folktales.”

The irony wasn’t lost on Rogue. “So it seems I’m not the one talking shit about the traditions now, huh?”

King shrugged, and resumed looking out over the camp. “They have no idea what’s coming, brother. They just play and hunt and go on living life.”

Rogue grabbed King’s shoulders, turning him. He stared for a long moment into his eyes. “I know,” he finally said. “And that’s why I have to go. That’s why I have to keep looking for new places. That’s why—”

King swallowed hard. “That’s why we can’t keep running forever. I can’t let them live their whole lives on the run, hiding from something that can find us anyway.”

“What changed your mind?”

King shook his head. “You said the winds were changing.”

The warm orange gave way to the deepening blue of dusk. Mosquitoes buzzed, mountain crickets chirped. Fat, hungry bullfrogs croaked, looking either for mates or meals. Either treat would scratch the same itch.

“Will you stay tonight?”

Rogue nodded. “I’ll leave as soon as the sun comes up tomorrow. I want to get as far to the west as I can. I want to find a place for us.”

“That’s not all though,” King said softly.

“No,” Rogue smiled. “It isn’t all I want to find.”

That night, the clan ate and drank their fill, and then when full dark descended all the bears went to their temporary dens, except the two alphas who watched from their cave until all the cubs were safe and asleep.

“I’ll take first watch,” Rogue said, gripping his brother’s shoulder.

King shook his head. “You’ll do no such thing. I’ll just be sitting around like a lump for days on end. I’m a toad, remember?” King laughed under his breath. He wasn’t always dour, especially after he drank a few quarts of honey wine. “You’ll be out ranging – you need the rest. I’ll take both.”

For a moment the two bears stared into one another’s eyes, understanding dawning on them both. Finally, King nodded. “Get some sleep,” he said. “Morning comes early.”

“Well,” Rogue said with a grin. “Morning does, yes. That’s sort of its thing.”

The two shared a short laugh, and then Rogue pulled one of the age-softened, tanned hide blankets up over his shoulder, and curled an arm under his head. Sleep came quickly.

But what came just after he slipped into the soft, blanketed darkness of unconsciousness were visions of the woman who had been haunting him for months.

Rogue awoke, lifting himself out of the blankets before the sun came up. His brother was sitting still at the edge of his overlook, slowly scanning the horizon, back and forth, tirelessly.

“I feel her,” Rogue said as he laid his hand on King’s shoulder. “I’m going to find her.”

The two exchanged a long glance, then Rogue nodded, and hopped down the face of the small cliff.

He crouched. Shaking his huge head from side to side, his hair flew in a torrent, then shortened as fur crawled out of him. Rogue’s legs bent at an odd angle, thickened, and seconds later, he gave his sworn brother one last roar.

King smiled and nodded.

With the mark on his chest burning, Rogue was going to find two things: a place for the clan, and the mate that was making his chest tingle and itch.

She had to be out there, somewhere, he knew.

In the distance, he heard a howl, and then another. I’m not the only thing looking for her, sounds like, he thought, as he dashed into the green.





-3-


“And here we are, a guy wearing an actual cummerbund. Great.”


-Jill


“No, no, I’m not hunting Bigfoot in the forest.”

Jill pushed her hair back and sat forward. This was the eighth set-up date she’d been on, and somewhere in the middle for horribleness. “I’m a scientist, I mean, I—”

“I heard that stuff was real though. Or at least there were like lost species in the woods out there.” The guy, Tripp, sat forward. He was one of those people who really own their weird name.

He was, Jill had learned, the prince to a massively successful hotel empire. The order of those words was important.

They had argued for a while over the difference between a hotel, a motel, and an inn, but this guy insisted he was the lord of a great hotel domain, even though Jill was fairly certain something called “Stop N Drop” was less luxury resort hotel and more flophouse where you can pay by the hour.

She put up her hands, and started to correct him, but then just decided to have a drink instead. Luckily, a waiter saw her gesture and thought she was calling him over. “Need something?”

“Oh God yes,” she said, sounding a little more desperate than she meant to sound. The waiter smiled, in what she guessed must’ve been commiseration. “What can I get you? Another beer?”

“Yes,” she said, but caught herself. “Actually let’s do a Jack and diet?”

“Perfect, and for you sir?”

Tripp hesitated. “I’m not sure you have what I want.”