Reign: A Royal Military Romance

by Roxie Noir

  Then, everything around him had become a National Forest, literally overnight, protected from logging. His company, Cedar Pine International, had fought a little but they were shifting production overseas anyway, and didn’t try too hard. When the Forest Service offered Jake and most of the other lumberjacks a job, it was a no-brainer. Of course he’d work in the field office, doing very nearly the same job he’d had before, and even adding a couple of skills: clearing brush from trails, monitoring controlled burns, backpacking into remote areas, searching for lost hikers.

  In fact, Jake had quickly become known for his keen sense of direction and place, and his uncanny ability to locate people who were lost in the forest. He did have much sharper sense than most people, after all.

  He ate a leisurely breakfast of bacon and eggs in his little kitchen in his cabin in the woods. He’d built it with his own hands before he was twenty-seven. Even though he had a vague sense that kids his age were supposed to move to the city and live their wild years or something, he’d been totally content working on his own house every night, then camping out beside it, at least until he moved in. People too close by tended to bother him, probably because, even as a human, his senses were a little sharper than theirs. They were noisy, they smelled a little odd all the time, like perfume and soap. No, Jake preferred the solitude of the woods.

  All he needed, he thought sometimes, was a mate to share it with.

  He saw the new poster on the forest office as soon as he pulled his truck into the gravel parking lot, the last in a line of trucks.

  WARNING

  POSSIBLE GRIZZLY SIGHTING

  EXERCISE CAUTION

  Below the words was a picture, pixelated and obviously from a Google image search, of a roaring grizzly bear.

  Jake felt himself go cold, all the same, and his stomach leaped into his throat. Had someone seen him?

  He was so careful though. Miles and miles and miles of pure, beautiful forest without a soul in sight, and he tended to stay there, only going to close to civilization as he was shifting in and out.

  It could be one of the others, of course. They’d have to talk, and soon.

  “Morning,” said Shelly as Jake walked in the door. She was wearing what was very nearly their uniform: jeans and a flannel shirt, carrying a cup of coffee back from their break room.

  “Morning,” he said, and then jerked his thumb back at the doorway he’d just come through. “A grizzly?”

  “Isn’t it exciting?” she said. She blew on her coffee gently, and the liquid rippled slightly. “There haven’t been grizzly bears here since the early nineteen hundreds. Maybe the initiative is working.”

  “I hope the people in town feel that way,” Jake said. “I’m not sure too many of them will be excited about the possibility of having grizzlies around again.”

  “Oh, I doubt they’ll come anywhere near town,” she said. “They’re notorious loners. This one was only just spotted by a flyover helicopter that was looking for a marijuana farm way, way up by Mineral Mountain that got reported by some hikers.”

  Jake felt the relief wash over him in a cold wave. That was in the middle of nowhere — exactly where the forest service wanted grizzly bears to be. “Oh, they only saw it from a helicopter?” he said. “They’re sure it was a grizzly?”

  “Pretty sure,” Shelly said. “There’s always room for error, but it was Danny who saw it, and you know he’s seen his share of black bears.”

  Danny had been a forest ranger for over twenty years. Jake was willing to concede the point that he knew his bears.

  Jake walked to his desk. A small pile of papers awaited him, and he read through a few of them without really seeing them as his computer booted up. He answered emails for half an hour, until Herbert, another ranger, poked his head in.

  “Hey,” Herb said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Can I ask you a big favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “I got these two girls I’m supposed to meet at lunch today,” Herb said. “Bigfoot hunters, apparently there’s been a lot of sightings lately, but I’m swamped.”

  Jake laughed, spinning a little in his chair. “Swamped, or you hate the people who look for Bigfoot?”

  Herb’s face broke into a grin. “Just completely, totally swamped,” he said. He winked. “I’m happy to do that soil report for you if you talk to these girls.”

  “It’s a deal,” Jake said. Anything to get out of the office. Even though he liked his job, he liked getting out and stretching his legs even more.

  “Perfect,” said Herb.

  4

  Ariana

  Since it was a rare sunny day in northern Washington state, the two girls sat outside with Sam Croner, the first of their Bigfoot sighting interviewees. His wife, a very nice woman in her 40s, offered them iced tea as they sat on his patio, asking him detailed questions about the figure he’d seen at the lake while he was fishing.

  “It was a little bit dark,” he admitted. “And I’d had a few, but when I looked over, there was this big, big thing that almost looked like a human but wasn’t, and I looked at it for a long time, and then it finally looks over at me and sees me lookin’, and it runs away.”

  “Can you describe why you thought it saw you looking at it?” Theresa said.

  Sam leaned back in his chair. The ice cubes in his glass knocked against each other. “You know how, say, when your dog sees you catch it do something it ain’t supposed to, it kinda freezes for a minute? It was like that. He was just lookin’ around, and then saw me, and made off right away.”

  “Before it saw you, what was it doing?” Ariana asked. She was pretending to take notes, but mostly doodling in her notebook: this guy had seen something move in the dark, while he was drunk. It wasn’t good evidence for anybody.

  “Just kinda crouching there, by the lake,” Sam said. “If I had to guess, I’d say he was appreciating the natural beauty of nature.”

  The natural beauty of nature, Ariana thought. What a wordsmith.

  “What makes you call the unknown creature ‘he’?” asked Theresa.

  Sam blinked. “Ain’t Bigfoot a he?”

  It was one of those questions without an answer.

  “When it moved away,” said Ariana, “how did it move?”

  “It had these two long arms and they kinda swung like an elephant’s trunk,” Sam said. With the arm that wasn’t holding his iced tea, he swung in a long motion. Ariana had to fight the urge to giggle. “And he walked kinda hunched over, like a hunchback or something. Swinging these arms, hunching over. Though I didn’t see too much of him, he was gone real fast.”

  Theresa nodded seriously, even though Ariana was having a hard time not rolling her eyes at the man.

  “Okay,” Theresa said. “Is there anything else you can think of? Anything at all?”

  Sam took a sip of his iced tea, and then leaned forward in his lawn chair. “This might sound crazy,” he began, a very serious look on his face for someone who’d recently had a Bigfoot sighting, “but right before he went back into the trees he kind of looked back over his shoulder at me, and it was so dark that all I could see was his eyes, and man, I just got this feeling like he knew, he knew something about me and I got this shudder run through my body for a second. Then, I blinked and he was gone, but for a minute there I really had the chills.”

  Ariana nodded seriously. Had the Bigfoot chills, she wrote in her notepad.

  A few minutes later they said goodbye to Sam and his wife, shutting the gate on their chain link fence and walking back to their rental car.

  “That was a bust,” muttered Ariana.

  “I don’t know,” said Theresa. “He might have actually seen something there.”

  “I’m sure he saw something,” said Ariana. “Not Bigfoot, though.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “It was dark. He was drunk. He makes it sound good, but you can tell he only barely saw something from the corner of his eye.” She
shook her head and went through her pocket for the car keys, then unlocked the car doors and the two girls climbed in, dumping their stuff in the back seat.

  “He only thought it was Bigfoot because of the other sightings,” said Ariana. She turned the car on. “Otherwise he’d have thought he saw a bear or a guy or something.”

  Theresa sighed.

  “People are so suggestible,” Ariana said, and pulled away from the curb.

  The next witness to Bigfoot was Jane, a fundraiser for an environmental nonprofit in town who wanted to meet them at the coffee shop across town from her office.

  “No one needs to see me talking to the Bigfoot people,” she’d said, and on the phone, Ariana had pretended not to be slightly offended by that.

  When they got there, a big space, wooden walls, comfortable couches, they could identify her immediately. She was the only one in business gear; everyone else looked like they were camping. Ariana and Theresa introduced themselves, and started going through the usual questions.

  “Honestly, I don’t have a whole lot of information,” Jane said. She seemed very down-to-earth, and even though she claimed she’d seen a Bigfoot, Ariana liked her. “I was, you know, tinkling on this one side of a big ravine, and when I looked up, there was this humanoid walking along the top of the other side.”

  “Was it looking at you?” Theresa asked.

  Please don’t ask if Bigfoot’s a creeper, thought Ariana.

  “Not at all,” Jane said. “It seemed very focused. Moving at an impressive clip.”

  “Could you describe its movements?” asked Ariana.

  “It was walking upright, bipedally,” Jane said. “It had longer arms than a human does — almost to its knees, I want to say — and its neck was really thick. It definitely had fur, lots and lots of fur.”

  “How much of its face could you see?” asked Theresa, leaning in.

  Ariana frowned a tiny frown, just to herself. She could already envision the car ride to lunch, when Theresa told her all the reasons that Jane had really seen a Bigfoot. For a cryptid researcher, the other girl didn’t really have the necessary skepticism.

  “I couldn’t really see its face, even in silhouette,” Jane said. She sipped her drink. “By the time I looked up, it was already facing away, though for a moment I did get the impression that I saw a snout.”

  Ariana raised one eyebrow and wrote that down.

  “Fascinating,” said Theresa, her eyes wide and shiny.

  “I’ve gotta be honest, it scared the bejesus out of me,” said Jane. “I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was Bigfoot, but it could have also been some crazy axe-murdering mountain man.”

  That’s more likely, thought Ariana.

  “Well, you seem fine now,” Ariana said. “Thanks for talking to us.”

  “Did you get any feelings from the creature?” asked Theresa. “Any impressions?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Stop asking if she got the Bigfoot chills, Ariana thought.

  “When you saw it, how did you respond, emotionally?” Theresa asked.

  “I panicked and peed a little on my hiking shoes,” Jane said.

  Ariana couldn’t help but smile, and at that, Jane smiled too.

  “Can’t say I’m not being honest with you,” the other woman said. “I know it sounds a little crazy. But I really did see something up there, and it really didn’t seem quite human.”

  Ariana and Theresa finished up and thanked Jane, who had to get back to work.

  “My coworkers think I’m meeting with a donor,” she said, smiling slyly. “I don’t need them thinking I’m a believer all of a sudden.”

  “Are you?” asked Theresa, eyes wide.

  Jane shrugged. “I saw something strange,” she said. “That’s all I really know.”

  Not particularly a believer herself, Ariana smiled.

  “I think she saw him,” said Theresa as soon as they got into the car, before she even put on her seatbelt. “Bigfoot.”

  Ariana sighed and started the car. She hoped the diner where they were meeting the forest ranger wasn’t too far away, because if it was, they’d be late. “Jumping to conclusions like that is bad science,” she said. “It’s not our job to confirm what the crackpots of the world think, it’s to check out their claims scientifically.”

  Theresa snorted, a very unladylike sound. “You know the CRF wants us to find something real,” she said.

  “Do they?” said Ariana. “Once we find an animal, it’s just an animal. It gets a genus and species and goes in the taxonomy somewhere, and then it gets boring.” She made a right out of the coffee shop parking lot. “They’re a lot more exciting when they’re legends.”

  “There’s always more,” said Theresa, undeterred. “Besides, don’t you want to find just one?”

  Ariana was quiet after a moment. “Think we could name it after ourselves?”

  5

  Jake

  Jake was at the diner early. He preferred getting places early and then having time to mentally prepare for whatever was coming, even when it was only a few girls out looking for Bigfoot. They’d be no problem, but why stress out about anything?

  After all, he had plenty on his plate. For the first time in almost a hundred years, someone had seen a grizzly bear, and it hadn’t been him. He’d been far away from Mineral Mountain all weekend, almost clear across the park, so it had been one of his pack. That is, if you could call three shifters in the same area a pack — they were more like castoffs, the ones who hadn’t fit into the weird dynamics of the real packs up north, in Alaska. They’d chosen the place together, almost fifteen years ago, after learning that the North Cascades were introducing a Grizzly Initiative, but other than that, Jake rarely interacted with the other men. He was pretty sure neither had moved, but he didn’t even know that for sure.

  Jake was halfway through his cup of coffee when he suddenly noticed two girls, both looking in their twenties, get out of a small sedan. They were talking animatedly, and they weren’t local — Jake was pretty sure he knew every local girl — but that wasn’t even what he noticed.

  What he noticed was that the brunette was stunning. Jake’s coffee stopped halfway to his mouth and his hand hung there, mid-air, as he stared at her and her friend walking through the parking lot to the front door of the diner.

  She was just wearing jeans and a striped, button-down shirt, but something about the way both items fit her, hugging her curves, giving the impression that they just barely contained her raw sensuality, made Jake’s mouth go dry.

  The other girl was nice enough looking too, he figured, but goddamn, the brunette.

  The girls walked in and said something to Debbie at the hostess station, and she smiled and pointed right at Jake. All at once, in very quick succession, he realized that they were the Bigfoot hunters he was meeting, that he had a half-boner, and that he’d been staring-slack jawed at them for several seconds now. He tried to play it off, looking away from them and taking a sip of his coffee, before making eye contact when they approached.

  “Hi,” said the brunette. “You’re Jake Kodiak?”

  “Sure am,” he said, smiling. He stood from the booth and shook the girls’ hands, towering over them. His fur had finally receded and he’d rolled up the sleeves of his flannel shirt.

  “I’m Ariana and this is Theresa,” they said. “We’re from the Cryptid Research Foundation.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Please, have a seat and tell me what you need to know.”

  The waitress came right over; Ariana got a coffee and Theresa got a Mountain Dew. When Ariana took a sip, Jake felt like all he could see were her lips, touching the crappy diner mug, then the way her tongue flicked out afterwards, collecting the stray drops.

  “We think there may be a Bigfoot in the area,” Theresa began.

  Ariana coughed in surprise, and shot the other girl a look. Jake’s eyebrows shot up.

  “There have been several sightings of a possibly-un
known creature,” Ariana said. She put her coffee down on the table. Admonished, Theresa took a sip of Mountain Dew. “We wanted to meet with someone who knows the area well to see if we can get some information about the areas where the unknowns were seen.”

  “Sure,” said Jake. “I’ve been a ranger for about six years now, but I’ve lived here since I was twenty. Used to be a lumberjack before we had to close up shop,” he said.

  Stop trying to show off for this girl, he thought.

  “I know these woods inside and out,” he went on, unable to stop himself.

  “Great!” piped up Theresa.

  Ariana wished that Theresa would shut up and stop making them look like idiots in front of the ranger. Yes, she was very — very — aware that he was attractive and Theresa was single, but they were there on business, dammit.

  Sure, his forearms were visibly rippling with muscle, and sure, he was huge and burly and perhaps the most solidly built man she’d ever seen. And yes, sure, he could probably lift her up and toss her onto a bed without breaking a sweat—

  Ariana swallowed and forced herself to focus. For a brief moment she thought of Graham, and then thought the better of it. He wasn’t coming off too well at the moment.

  Instead, she produced a small map of the national forest from her bag, with three small red X’s on it. “As far as we can tell, these are where the three sightings took place,” she said. One X was on the side of a lake, one in the middle of the forest, and one right on a small back road.

  Jake took the map and pored over it, carefully, his brows knitting together.

  “Someone saw Bigfoot at the Last Chance?”

  “Is that the bar?”

  “Yeah, it’s Tom’s place. It’s right around here, if I’m not mistaken.” He knew he wasn’t, but tried to downplay his sense of direction sometimes, knowing it was a little too good to be human.