by Lynn Red
I felt sorry for him. Somehow, some way, I felt like he really had no choice but to do this. That didn’t help the betrayal gnawing my guts, or the stab of anger from his rough words, and his apparent instantaneous change in personality.
“What if you die?” I asked him. “Do I just stay in here and starve?”
He shoved me backwards, behind the bars. The door swung shut and closed with a heavy thud of metal on metal. Without a word, without even a glance in my direction, he closed the lock, turned the key and turned away.
“Grave!” I cried out. “You don’t have to like me! You don’t have to trust me, but will you really leave me to die in this cage if you don’t make it back?”
“If we die,” he said softly, “then there’s no hope for you either. If the wolves, the overseers, whatever else they’ve brought, if they overcome us, then what’s a human girl with a pointed stick going to do?”
I felt like he was giving me a chance. It was one of those moments when you just know that the question asked has more weight, more importance, than at first glance it seems.
“If I’m going to die,” I said, “I at least want to do it on my feet, not locked in a goddamn cage just waiting to be dinner for some slavering beast. Give me my spear and at least let me protect my dignity if I can’t protect my life.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly. “Is this the truth?” he asked, only turning his head halfway, not turning his body. “Or is this false courage?”
“I tried to fight you didn’t I?” I asked sharply. “I fought wolves once, why can’t I do it again? I’ll at least take a few out with me.”
I saw his shoulders shake just a bit with what must’ve been laughter. “Maybe I’m wrong about you, girl,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I think you might be different from the others. Or maybe I’m just lovesick and stupid.”
I never expected him to react like that. “You’re not stupid,” I said under my breath. “You might be an asshole, but you’re not stupid.”
Something clanked against the bars of my cage, and fell to the dirt. I didn’t take my eyes off of Grave, though. I thought for whatever reason, it was more important for me to maintain my stiffness and my purpose, than it was to see whatever had landed at my feet. “And you’re going to have to trust me eventually,” I continued. “If I have to trust you, then—”
“It’s the key,” he said. “If we don’t come back by the time your hunger is too much to handle, and if somehow, you haven’t ended up dead by then, you have your way out.”
“And the spear?” I asked, feeling slightly inflated with pride. “Where’s that?”
“I threw it in your cage with you.”
He turned again, shoulders sloping. He’d transform soon, but something was making him pause. “Don’t let me down,” he said. “Maybe the others are right. Maybe you’re different. But if you decide to do something stupid and end up dead, we’ll never know.”
I felt like he was smiling, though he was looking away. “I won’t,” I said. “I’ll wait.”
Finally he looked back my way. “I don’t know why,” he said softly, “but I like you. Some tiny part of me, whatever part can still feel that sort of emotion, that part of me likes you. Stay safe, Adriana.”
“Wait!” I called out after him. I had the distinct feeling that there probably wasn’t another being on earth that had heard Grave say anything like that, in the way he’d said it. “Grave!”
But he was gone. They were all gone, and I was alone in a rusted cage with a spear I could hardly use.
I stooped down and plucked the cold, metal key off the ground. I ran my fingers along the prongs, and along the loop of metal that made the top of it. Poking my finger through the hole, the chill of the metal surrounded my finger, and seemed to help me focus my thoughts.
When it came down to it though, my fears were real. I was alone, completely alone, in the back of a cave, in a rusted cage, hidden by a mat of thatch.
And what the hell was I going to do with a spear I didn’t know how to use?
I sighed heavily, and sat down with my back against the wall, my spear in my hands. I rested my head back against the stone, feeling the chill on my scalp. Outside, I heard them: the sounds of battle, of screeching and pain.
I heard a whole lot of yelping and even more roars.
As I sat, wondering what the hell was going to happen to me, I began wondering how the hell three werebears were going to stand a damned chance in hell against ten? Twenty? A hundred werewolves?
Trust me, when you’re locked in a cage with no real clue if you’re going to live or to die, the worst thing you can possibly do to while away the time is think about the chances your magical bear protectors have against a horde of ravenous wolves.
Just stop, Ade, I thought. There’s no point to worrying, no point to obsessing over what could, what will. Just focus, just calm down. They’ve fought them a hundred times before, this one isn’t any different.
I let my spear’s tip drop and clang against my cage. Maybe it would all work out. Maybe Wild’s bravado and Grave’s determination and Craze’s rage would be all they needed to survive.
Then again…
No, I thought again, sharply criticizing myself for the doubt. No, Ade, not this way, don’t do this.
Still my thoughts turned dark. Underneath it all, I was just a girl, no matter how much I felt like I’d changed in a few days, I was still just a girl with a science degree who had a little trouble putting failing grades on papers because I had just a shred too much empathy for the kids I taught.
Wait, I thought. That’s it. That’s where to focus. The cubs. They need me, they need me to teach them, to guide them… in whatever the hell I’m supposed to guide them in. That’s what I am, I’m a mate-mother.
Unconsciously, my hands tightened around the haft of the spear, so tightly that the skin squeaked against the wood. I found myself standing up, I found myself threading my hand through the bars and sticking the key into the lock. I fumbled a few times but then I turned the key and felt a little surge of energy run through me.
“I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” I said out loud. “I’m going to get myself killed.”
Outside, the fury still raged. I could make out the voices of the bears shouting to one another over the general haze of battle. Their voices boomed, exploded even, above the yelping and howling of the wolves and whatever these overseers were.
Courage bubbled up from whatever well was deep in my belly. It was the same feeling I had when I charged like an idiot into the woods after that girl who turned out to be nothing more than bait.
“You’re charging into God knows what, Ade,” I whispered. My hair hung limply around my face, dampened from the moisture of the cave and my own sweat and maybe a few tears. Without thinking about it, I used the end of my spear to cut away one of my sleeves to use as a headband. Can’t have a bunch of hair flopping in your eyes in the middle of a battle, right? I mean what the hell, if you wouldn’t want it happening during a tennis match, definitely not during a life and death struggle.
“You’re charging in,” I told myself again as my feet seemed to move of their own volition toward the cave’s opening. “And you better be real good and ready.”
I wasn’t sure I was ready. Hell, I wasn’t even sure what ready was, to be completely honest. But somehow, when I heard Craze cry out in a way that sounded an awful lot like pain, the steel I’d seen in Grave’s eyes just minutes before settled into my soul.
My soul was iron, my purpose full of grit.
“Whoever the hell hurt him,” I said as I stepped out of the cave and into the light, “better be real goddamn ready for me.”
3
Sunlight scorched my eyes, and as I stepped out into the air, blinking like an idiot, the smell of blood was so strong it was almost a taste.
That coppery, bitter scent filled my nose, and as I looked around, trying to make sense of what the hell I was doing, I heard a familiar voi
ce.
“You let her out?” it was Wild, calling to Grave. “I thought you were the hard one!”
I looked in the direction of the voice and saw the golden bear standing on top of three wolves in various states of mess. His mouth was bloody, and wounds on his side that looked absolutely horrible to me didn’t seem to be stopping him at all. He stood up on his hind legs, unleashed a roar so terrible I felt it shake me to the core, and ran toward me.
“Get down!” he shouted. “Now!”
Without thinking, I fell to the ground, covering my head. Wind, and something much sharper, rushed over me and the sound of impact followed. “Stab!” Craze said. “Here!”
He forced the wolf’s leg away from its torso, and I did as he said, thrusting the axe head into the wolf’s armpit. It let out a shriek, then scratched at him and snapped at me, before it finally went limp.
“Is that thing wearing armor?” I asked, looking toward Grave, who was locked in upright, bipedal combat with the black thing I’d seen earlier. It was wearing what looked like a collection of cast-off parts to shield itself.
“Overseer,” Craze said. His voice was ragged, sharp, and he was drawing harsh breaths in between words. “I think they get all that stuff from junkyards.”
I looked back at the hulking beast, and watched it sideswipe Grave, who went flying and then crashed heavily into the trunk of a massive tree. Bark flew out in a splash, and he shook his head and charged again, slamming a shoulder into the thing’s gut and causing it to reel backward.
“What is that?” I asked. “That isn’t a wolf.”
“Overseer,” Craze said again. “Old wolf. Real, real old one. They get crazier and crazier the older they get until they end up like, well, that.”
Looking over at the slick, black bear near my side, I realized that he was in far worse shape than Wild. A bloody mark ran down the side of Craze’s face, and even in bear form, I saw him wincing as he took breaths. “Strong too,” he said. “One of them took a chunk out of me before I managed to get him down. I think there’s just the one left, though. That’s the good part about them, they usually fight between themselves enough that any more than two or three and they tear each other apart just as soon as they’ll fight anyone else.”
Wild limped to where we were and sat down heavily. “That’s most of them,” he said.
I looked up to where they’d been battling only seconds before, and saw that the few wolves left around were limping off, and those who weren’t seemed not to be getting up at all.
“What about him?” I looked toward Grave who was still locked in something that looked like a wrestling hold with the overseer. “Shouldn’t we help?”
Grave landed a paw swipe on the side of the thing’s furry face, and sent the creature spinning and then crashing to the ground.
“Last time I got between him and an overseer, I ended up…” Wild’s voice fell away suddenly enough that I looked toward him, away from the battle. His eyes were rolled back in his head, and he was bleeding more heavily than I thought before.
“Ended up,” he said, opening his eyes for just a moment before they lolled back in his head and he flopped to the side again, unconscious.
“What’s wrong with him?” Craze asked, not paying much attention to the unconscious bear in favor of watching the slugfest. “Keeps not talking.”
“He’s knocked out, you moron!” I shouted. “He’s covered in cuts and god knows how many gouges. We need to get him to a hospital or a doctor or something. Don’t you guys have one of those pocket doctors like the mafia guys always do in gangster movies?”
Craze lifted an eyebrow as he watched me. “I gotta be honest, I understood about six of the words you just said. Our doctors are a lot less… uh… present, than you probably hope.”
“Then how do you prevent infections? How the hell do you fix… that?” I turned back to the wounded bear whose head flopped back and forth the way a sleeping dog’s does when he’s having a very exciting dream. “How do you keep from dying from tooth abscesses?”
Craze stared at me for a moment. “Again, not too sure what most of that means, but it all sounds very bad. As far as the tooth thing, we’re not grotesques, we chew on sticks and make our teeth clean.”
He smiled broadly, to show me exactly what he meant. Sure enough, his teeth were very white, almost shockingly so, and I realized that somehow I hadn’t thought about that in all the time we’d spent holed up in that cave. Sure enough, his teeth were nice and white.
“Okay well, either way,” I said, beginning to get a little frustrated with the lack of modernity for the first time in a week and change. “We need to do something to keep that from getting infected.”
Again, Craze just watched me with complete disbelief on his face. “Infection?”
I sighed heavily. “Gets red? He gets a fever, starts shaking? Eventually starts going crazy and dies?”
“Oh!” he announced. “That’s an infection? Huh. Pack it with yellowroot and he’ll heal.”
“Okay,” I said, “and where do I get yellowroot?”
“By the water,” Craze said with a shrug. “It’s, I don’t know, a yellow root. Hard to be more specific.”
From behind us, Grave and the overseer kept battering at each other, but with one decidedly horrific crunch, that encounter was over. Grave’s steel-gray chest was opened from collar to belly with shallow cuts that I assumed were from the creature’s claws, but as he shifted back to a human, the cuts shrank to the point where they were almost invisible. Without a word, he knelt beside the fallen creature, cut something from it, and tromped off down the hill where they’d had their brief war.
“What’s with him?” I asked Craze, turning back to the wounded bear at my feet.
He shrugged his huge shoulders. “Moody, I guess. He’s worried about you. Concerned, might be a better word, I guess, but I’m not too sure. He keeps to himself. Always has.”
“That cage,” I said, my voice faltering, “I thought he was going to leave me to die.”
Craze grunted and stood, offering me his hand. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go get the yellowroot. Better to spend our time doing something useful than to try and figure out how that bear’s brain works.”
I took the hand, and stood, popping my knees and then my back as I rose. “Yeah,” I said with a glance back at the huge bear, who was just barely visible over the hill’s crest. “You’re probably right.”
4
“Here,” Craze said, crouched down low and plucking through the various leaves and reeds sticking up from the creek’s bank. “I think this is it.”
With a grunt that must’ve been exaggerated, he
yanked up a plant that revealed a yellow tuber about three inches long, and thick as my pinky. He offered it to me with an outstretched hand, and a very proud grin.
“One problem,” I said, “this is blue.”
“Damn,” Craze swore. “I always get those mixed up.”
“Wait, you get yellow and blue mixed up? I mean I’ve heard of red-green colorblindness, but that’s a new one on me.”
“I’m not colorblind,” he said with an irritated chuff. “I just see the wrong colors sometimes. It’s no big deal.”
“Right,” I said, hiding my smile. Even with his gruff bravado, I liked Craze. He’s the sort of person I could see myself spending a lot of time, and drinking a lot of beer, with. “So, are you sure we’re not looking for blue root?”
He gave me a wry smile. “Funny,” he said with the tiniest hint of a snarl curling his words. “But no, it’s yellow. The blue one is really poisonous.”
As I watched, the massive, beautiful, naked man opened his mouth, inserted the root, and chomped down.
“Craze!” I shouted, lunging toward him. “What are you doing? The poison, I—”
From behind, I hear a laugh; rumbling and startling. “You’re an idiot, Craze. Stop harassing her.”
Craze shrugged. “Just a joke,” he said. “Tastes li
ke a mixture of yams and blueberries. I can’t remember what they’re called, but it certainly isn’t poisonous.”
He stooped low and plucked another before offering it to me. I scrunched my nose, took it from him and sniffed. “Smells kinda terrible,” I said.
“Try it,” the voice from behind us. “We make them into flatcakes.”
I lifted it to my lips and had almost stuck it into my maw when I froze solid. “Grave?” I asked, turning to face him. “Why did you do that to me?”
“Do what? Protect you?” his words came quickly and fiercely, as though he was actually angry at me for saying something to him. “How can you blame me for what I did?”
Immediately I felt the blood rise in my face. A hot flush crept up my neck and before I knew what I was saying, or what I was doing, I was on him. Failing to grab any clothes, as he didn’t have any, I grabbed his huge shoulders, dropping the midnight-blue tuber as I did.
“You were going to leave me to die! I had to beg you for the key and a weapon!”
His eyes, steely gray, like the barrel of an old gun, bore into me. Where I’d felt hot rage before, a wave of cool washed over me. I thought for a second that maybe he had put some kind of hex on me, but I knew that was stupid. Somehow, with all the ridiculous things happening all around me, magic spells still came off as ridiculous.
Grave threw something to the ground at my feet that bounced harmlessly against my leg before settling into the leaves. “I was protecting you from something worse than death. How can you not understand?”
“Grave?” Craze stepped up. I noticed that, when I turned briefly toward him, he was holding a long, thick yellow root, about the length and girth of two thumbs. “Maybe you should… try to understand?”
At this the giant bear whipped his gray eyes away from my face, turning his attention to the smaller one. “What?” he snarled. “You question me?”
Unconsciously I took a few steps back so that I wouldn’t be between the two of them. I got the distinct impression that of all the places I could be, in the middle of two pissed off, giant, magical bear-men was probably not the best one.