Between a Bear and a Hard Place(55)
Before anyone could react, both men had half-shifted, their chests turned to furry barrels, their arms and legs to tree trunks. Stone was slate gray, striking and severe. King was golden, just like his one glittering eye. It wasn’t lost on anyone watching that past coloring, the two looked very, very similar to one another.
Teeth gnashed, claws flew, and blood came next. Stone and King met in the middle, jaws apart, faces an inch away from one another. There wasn’t a whole lot anyone was going to do, but they’d been doing a whole lot of what Draven had called alpha posturing, and hadn’t cut any skin, at least not seriously. Lots of punching, lots of head squeezing and really nasty looking neck wrenching, but neither of them had decided to take a chunk out of the other.
“So this is normal?” Claire asked the old man, or whoever was listening. “I’m used to guys acting like they’re going to fight over stuff but this is a little over the top.”
The two dueling alphas clasped hands in the middle. Their arms created a triangular, steeple-like configuration, similar to professional wrestlers circling one another to begin a match. King snarled, Stone growled, and then they slammed their chests together. They were of a very similar height, and similar build to go with their almost identical coloration.
“Are they related?” Claire asked. “They look so similar that—“
“Wouldn’t be possible,” Rogue said, as he and Fury joined the audience. All they needed was popcorn and a few beers, and they’d have the best seat in the house at a prize fight that was going nowhere. “Those two – your two – they were taken long ago. We were only teenagers when the clan was split.”
Everyone winced at a bone-crunching blow from Stone to King that was met almost immediately afterward with a counterpunch that would have severed any normal man’s liver, or kidneys, or spine, or anything else for that matter. Stone let out a wild howl and got a thick, muscled arm around his counterpart’s neck.
“You were only teenagers,” Draven said, “and so were they. I have a theory.”
His scientific musing was interrupted by a clothesline from King that was immediately followed with an absolutely brutal kick to the ribs of the fallen bear. But still – no real injuries.
“It’s an art, really,” Draven said, as though he were commenting on a boxing match. “They know exactly what to do that will hurt the other one, but they’re not willing to kill. I’ve counted six opportunities for King to kill Stone by this point, and four going the other way. All it would take is a snap of the neck or a particularly hard bite, to say nothing of a jugular—“
“Uh, okay,” Claire cut in, “that’s fantastic. Glad you’re liking this, but we still have other things to worry about.”
“Thirty years ago,” Draven went on, unimpeded by reason. “GlasCorp snatched part of the clan – all the women, most of the cubs, and a handful of the warriors. Stone and Fury, apparently, among those taken. They’re marked just like you are,” he was speaking to Rogue just then. “But it’s strange – one of the pairs had to have been marked after the kidnapping. It’s almost like our bodies, our DNA, knew that something was amiss. And so now we find ourselves with two sets of alphas. It’s happened before, plenty of times, but never has it happened and then all the alphas came back together.”
He was so thoughtful and interested in his little theory that no one particularly wanted to interrupt his musing. And so for a moment, they just watched. King and Stone exchanged another set of blows that would have severed the head of a normal human, but they just kept on like nothing had happened.
And then, what he’d said finally hit Claire. “Wait a second,” she said. “Twenty years? But that’s not possible, Eckert’s been the lead on this project the whole time it’s existed. He’s only in his forties. He’s smart, even if he is a fucking asshole, but not smart enough to start working at GlasCorp when he was like ten.”
“I’ve killed him once,” Fury said, finally drawing Rogue’s attention from the fight. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from all that time in a holding cell it’s that reason doesn’t particularly apply anymore. And we live longer than humans anyway – hundreds of years sometimes. Do you think it’s possible that—“
“An immortality serum,” Draven breathed. His revelation was punctuated by King headbutting Stone so hard that Stone’s entire body flew backward and into a tree trunk. It didn’t faze him though – he was back in King’s face a split second later. “I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but then again, what doesn’t?”