She was staring at him, mouth agape. Considering the whole just-turned-into-a-bear thing, it was pretty fantastic that of all that, the most surprising bit to her was that Draven knew so much about her schedule.
“So, tell me about my boyfriend next.”
“Which one? Stone? Fury?”
Holy shit, there it is. As soon as he said that, a knot that felt like it was approximately the size of a mutant grapefruit sprouted in Claire’s throat. There wasn’t really any reason to deny it, but the words being said gave the whole thing more gravity, more reality.
“They’re...?”
“No, of course not,” Draven said. “Mates are a much more serious business than boyfriends.”
He hadn’t expected to see her get quite that pale. But to her credit, Claire managed to choke back the confusion and total weirded-outness. “Right,” she said. “I guess it would be more serious than a boyfriend. But no, I have no idea about the place. I honestly thought it was just a building where a bunch of nerds did experiments on mice.”
“Mice, bears, pretty close to the same thing.” Draven had a wry grin on his face as he fished a cigarette out of his pocket.
“Wait, why are your clothes all fine? Why didn’t they rip?”
To show her, Draven grabbed one of his flannel sleeves and stretched it almost six inches before letting it snap back into place. “Spandex. Now, tell me about this building you worked in. Even if there’s not much you can remember, or at least not much that seems important, any detail, any kind of idea what kind of place we’re dealing with, it might help.”
With a deep breath, Claire started to recite every single detail of her building, from the guarded entrance to the massive elevators and the underground labs that were more or less the same thing as heavily armored bunkers.
Draven sat and listened, Jill and Jacques were caught up in tending the curious hole in the pilot’s chest. After every point of interest she recited, the old man clicked his tongue and nodded. Every so often he’d grunt assent, or prod the palm of his hand with a fingertip like that was as particularly important point.
“And they were underground?”
“Yeah,” Claire nodded. “All the way down in the deepest part of the place, basement three. Takes about five minutes from the surface, heading downward on that elevator, to get all the way down there.”
Draven made a few more notes. “No problem,” he announced, standing up and twisting at the waist, back and forth to pop his back. “I can work with that.”
He started toward where Jill and Jacques were sitting, but Claire grabbed the old man’s wrist, turning him back to face her. “You can work with it? What about me? Is anyone ever going to fill me in on what the hell is going on? Or how about let’s be even more basic – what the hell am I?”
His calm, gray eyes studied Claire’s face for a moment. Draven took a deep breath through his nostrils, then puffed his lips out and exhaled. “I know exactly how long you’ve been there, and I know exactly who Stone and Fury are.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming on.”
“But,” he said, grinning slightly, “you are... I have no idea. You’re special. We’re born the way we are. We have no choice, no option. We shift from the time we’re babies until the day we die. It’s as much part of us as your hair is part of you.” Draven pinched one of Claire’s dirty curls between his fingers. “For someone to just... pop?” he shook his head slowly. “Claire, you have to understand. That building, that place you worked, that is where every single female Broken Pine clan bear was taken. Most of the cubs, too, and more than a handful of males. The one thing I don’t understand is how you have that birthmark, which is the same one Jill has, unless...”
He trailed off, looking past Claire and into the darkness behind her, lost in thought.
“Unless what?” she asked, her voice jolting him back to reality.
“Unless somehow you were one of us and got... separated? Taken? Brainwashed?” He shook his head again, chewing on his bottom lip. “No, that wouldn’t make any sense. Only the mates of the alphas ever have that mark, and those two aren’t—”
“Can I tell you something?” Claire cut him off. “I can’t stop thinking about them. It’s not even just a little fantasy thing. It’s like I literally cannot stop thinking about Fury and Stone. They’re scarred, marked with all kinds of lines and cuts from the things GlasCorp did to them, but it’s not even that that I can’t stop seeing in my mind. It’s their eyes.”