Between a Bear and a Hard Place(61)

“Stone? Everything okay?” she asked again. That time when she kicked at him, he jolted slightly, like he’d been dozing in front of a TV and suddenly awakened by a commercial that was way too loud. “You seem kinda out of it.”

He looked up at her, that one green eye and the one gold one twinkling in the midday sun, but as she studied his face, something just seemed off. And it wasn’t the clamminess or the way he was staring at her, it was something very difficult to quantify, but something that she definitely felt.

“Yeah,” he finally said. His voice was hollow to the point that she hardly recognized he’d spoken. He’d never been one for verbosity, but this was ridiculous even for Captain Serious.

“Yeah what? Yeah something’s wrong or yeah everything is okay?”

Again, he sat there with his lips pooched out a bit, looking every bit the dejected, grumpy bear. But he’s never been clammy before. That’s...

“Stone!” it was Fury calling from past the clearing, out in the direction of the pup tent they’d been carrying around and living in for the last while. The tent was one of the better ideas Claire had on one of their trips into town to get more dog food, replace broken phones, get new batteries, things like that.

Rogue had gone off in that direction earlier to hunt, but as winter set in, the hunting became tougher to manage. When the other bear didn’t respond, Fury whistled with two fingers stuck in his mouth. It produced a sound so piercing and awful that any referee in the history of sports would have been jealous.

Stone just sat there, like his namesake.

With growing concern, Claire crouched down beside him – another skill she’d picked up recently, the flat-footed squat – and felt his forehead. Blech, so clammy and moist it feels like the slick cobbles on Bourbon Street. But no fever, or at least if there is one it isn’t bad.

“Just thinking,” Stone announced.

He wasn’t much for non sequiturs unless they happened to be jokes about his co-alpha.

“Right, you gonna expand on that, Siddhartha?” she asked. Herman Hesse would have been proud of the way the bear just stared blankly into space. “Hello? Anybody in there?”

Off in the distance, she heard Fury grumble something about the only one who does any work, which slightly offended her, before she remembered he actually had cut most of the firewood and done a good bit of the hunting. Come to think of it, Stone hasn’t really been the same ever since we got back together.

“Hey,” she said again, stroking his arm gently. “Did you see something back at the lab that upset you? You seem haunted. Aside from the clammy bit.”

She flattened her hand on his cool shoulder, which he promptly pulled away. “No,” he stated flatly. “Yes, maybe. I can’t remember. I don’t know.”

“See something,” he grumbled, before laughing under his breath. “See something. See something. See? Something?”

It was all very strange, and all barely audible, but he just went right on grumbling and grousing, mostly repeating the same disgruntled phrase, but every now and then he’d sprinkle it with some new word or other. If the gibbering weren’t enough, he started swaying a bit. When Claire grabbed his shoulder again in a gripping moment of panic, he looked up at her, confused.

He was back to normal.

All at once, his skin was the normal golden-tan, his eyes twinkled like always, and he was most notably not in any way slick to the touch. “You okay?” she asked again, having just witnessed something she couldn’t, in any way, explain.

“Yeah,” he said with a slight smile. “Why wouldn’t I be? Something going on?”

“I—no,” Claire cut herself off. She decided if there was something amiss, there wasn’t any reason to prod a tiger. And if there wasn’t, then she shouldn’t be such a damn cowardly weirdo all the time. “You just looked tired, is all.”

That’s a good enough lie, I guess.

He shrugged. “Guess so. Winter coming in, hunting gets bad. Gotta get everything ready if we’re going to burrow down and hold out until spring.”

Hold out until spring. It hit her in the stomach, a fist made out of a ton of bricks. “We’re staying?” she asked, slightly stunned, though not sure why – this wasn’t the first they’d talked of a long winter out here in the woods. “Why can’t we go back? Eckert’s alive, no one’s chasing us, can’t we please just go back to civilization? Cleo needs a visit to the groomer like nobody’s business.”

Stone climbed to his feet, muscled quadriceps flexing under Claire’s fingertips. He turned to face her. His eyes burning, his cheekbones somehow more picturesque and perfect than she remembered, Stone grabbed her chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilted back her head, and tasted her lips.