by Lynn Red
“I’ll get him,” I said, not entirely sure how I was going to manage, but completely convinced that I would. I crouched down beside him, looped his arm around my neck and strained with all my might. Every muscle in my legs flared to life and the small of my back burned like I’d just taken a cattle prod to the ass. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care how much it hurt, or if it gave me sciatica that lasted the rest of my life. I pushed with everything I had.
“Ah!” as I shot to my feet so fast I almost jumped, I heard laughter to my side, and then felt a squeeze on my neck. “What the hell?”
“I might be almost dead,” Grave said, “but I meant what I said. I love you, pup, and I’ll be damned if I let anything happen to you.”
“Your lungs must be trashed,” I said. “Put your weight on me.”
“No,” he said flatly. “Craze, Wild, come. We need your strength.”
In a flash the other two bears were at our side. As soon as he sensed them, Grave slumped. “I failed you,” he said. “All of us. I was a coward, but no more. No,” he slumped again. “More.”
“Grave?” I called out. “Wake up! Hey!” I slapped his cheeks, but they were ice cold. “Wake up!”
I looked first to Wild and then to Craze. They both stared back, wild-eyed and confused.
“Like I said,” Todd’s voice broke through again. “You made all this so very much easier. I can’t thank you enough. Turn up the gas, overseers,” he said as though he’d forgotten he was on the speakers. “We’ve got important things to do and they’re not going to stop us. Now! I said do it! No argument!”
I screamed, Craze growled and Wild hunched his shoulders and began his transformation. “I don’t care if we die in here,” he said turning to me with his face elongated and his teeth growing. “I’ll be damned if I’m going down without a fight.”
I took a step back, looking at him with my mouth hanging open. I stepped on something hard, rounded and smooth. “How did this get here?” I asked no one in particular, bending to get my spear.
“Dunno,” Craze said. “And I’m not much for signs and omens, but that’s a hell of a good one to me. Hold on,” a smile flitted across his lips, “this ain’t gonna be easy.”
5
“Need any…thing?” the creature’s halting voice was just one ingredient in a stew of noise surrounding Todd as he reclined against the stone slab he used as a desk. The sounds hitched in the overseer’s throat in a way that was very obvious painful. That it hurt the creature to speak gave Todd a little shot of happiness.
Running a hand over his scalp, Todd pushed himself languidly away from his desk and half-opened his eyes. Causing pain like this gave him the same sort of pleasure he imagined baser, rougher creatures got from sex. Goosebumps prickled his icy skin as he turned to the old, blurry monitor positioned in the corner of the room. He entwined his fingers behind his back and took a step closer to the boxy television.
“Any—”
“No!” Todd snapped at the creature’s repeated question. “If I need anything I’ll call you. Nothing could possibly make me happier right now.”
The monster shuffled toward the door, but Todd shot over to his side and grabbed the thing’s ear. “I forgot, there is something. Are the bears in the prison dead?”
The overseer shrugged its enormous shoulders. One of them was quite a bit lower than the other. “Been a…while,” it offered. “Must…be?”
“I don’t pay you for optimism,” Todd said. “Of course I don’t pay you anything anyway. I’ll have to do it all myself, won’t I? Not like I haven’t already. Get my daughter, we have work to do. And we have something glorious to watch.” The way he said glorious was almost syrupy. Such awful pleasure was on his voice that even a creature made to be brainless, like the overseer in front of him, got a hint of his vileness.
“Daughter…? Angel…Angel…” the creature stumbled over the words. For some reason, ‘l’ sounds always tripped them up.
“Yes, yes, Angelica. I only have the one.”
“What about… other… one?”
“Shut up!” Todd snapped. “The other one’s dead to me. She doesn’t matter, she never did. Now, will you do what I’m telling you, or do I have to replace you?”
For a moment the creature considered the question, and then tilted its head to one side. “Replace?”
“Never mind!” Todd screeched loudly, shoving the creature toward the door. As soon as it was gone, he went back to his desk and pressed down a switch. Like the old-style security camera it was, the monitor flickered, went to static, and then displayed a new image.
Nothing but billows of white smoke, and what appeared to be several prone bodies appeared. He watched for a moment, not entirely convinced it was that easy. One of them twitched briefly and then settled again. “If they’re not dead yet, they will be soon,” he said to himself. “There’s no way out, anyway. And that’s not the main event.”
He clicked the switch again as the door to his makeshift office opened with a satisfying creak. “Your monster said you wanted me,” a softer voice, but still a cold and harsh one, said in a register just above a whisper. “This isn’t about that stupid girl you keep wasting my time with, is it?”
The girl, long and lean, and a shade only slightly less ghostly than her father, slid across the floor like a glowing shadow.
“If you weren’t my daughter, I’d kill you,” Todd said.
“Didn’t stop you with Reika,” the girl said. “Although I guess you didn’t exactly kill her, if you’re going to be technical.”
Todd inflated himself and swept across the room until he was close enough to Angelica’s face that he could feel the chill of her even breathing on his neck. “Quiet,” he hissed.
She narrowed her eyes. “I’m already tired of this. I’ve done everything you asked of me, and you’re still fumbling around trying to kill this sad little bear clan. Why haven’t you managed yet?”
That brought a smile to Todd’s face. “I’m just about to do that, child, and thought you might want to watch.” His voice was smooth, easy and hushed. “I’ve killed the alphas. And now it’s time for the rest of them.”
Angelica regarded the older wolf with suspicion. “How do you know? You’ve gotten close before only to—”
“Shut up!” he hissed.
“Only to fall in love with the woman meant to be their mate,” she finished coldly. “Which took us on a four year detour. Five years? It’s hard to remember anymore.” She heaved a heavy sigh.
The image on the monitor shook, bumping evenly. “It’s almost in place,” Todd said. “Just as soon as we have eyes on the camp, I’ll end this once and for all.”
Suddenly, the camera stopped moving, and a furry hand covered the screen for a moment.
“They’re so stupid,” Todd said, more to himself than aloud. “Just put the goddamn thing in the ground!”
A face appeared in front of the camera, and then fog from the thing’s nostrils covered the image. Todd sighed, then flexed and relaxed his fists rhythmically. “Hurry up!”
When the fog cleared from the image, a number of huts came into view. A handful of cave openings were visible next, as the old camera focused. Todd smiled, stretched his shoulders and then put an arm around his daughter. She slapped it away and moved closer to the camera.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“Months of preparation,” he said. “Years of hatred building up, and I’m finally getting what I want. I’m getting the woods. I can clear cut the damn thing and no one will say anything. I can do whatever I want without those bears ruining it all. Oh I can almost feel it…”
“Yeah, well, stop,” Angelica said. “So far you’re impressed with a whole lot of nothing. How do you know your idiot slaves didn’t screw up again?”
“We’re about to see,” Todd said. He plucked something that resembled an old hand-held radio transceiver off his desk and began fumbling with the dial. “Just as soon as this one clears out,
we’ll set off the first charge. Move!” he shouted at the camera, knowing the creature couldn’t hear.
With a frustrated huff, Angelica snatched the device from her father, and twisted the dial.
Before he could react to what she’d done, the camera’s lens flooded with white light.
When the image faded to black, and the image on the monitor went to dead static, the two exchanged a glance.
“Well,” Angelica finally said. “It took you long enough.”
Nothing, not even his daughter’s sarcasm, could wipe the smile off Todd’s face. “This is going to be fun,” he said softly. “So… so much fun.”
Book Four – Mated
1
My lungs burned like hell. My eyes, when I opened them for a brief, stupid second, filled immediately with water. The tears running down my cheeks were hot, awful and reminded me as they soaked into my collar, that I was probably the only one out of all four of us still alive.
When I pushed myself up on my elbows and looked over the haze that filled the room, I realized that all the lights were on. Bright, nauseating, almost violent florescent bulbs burned above my head and made my eyes throb in their sockets. The whole place was so quiet that I could swear that I heard water dripping from somewhere distant and rolling along the stone floor.
Then again, I also thought the wafting and waning of the smoke in the room was audible, so I might have been going nuts. In times like that, when your entire life is flashing before your eyes and you’re fairly sure everyone you know, everyone you care about, is dead on the floor around you, it’s hard to tell the difference between horrible reality and nightmares.
It was the strangest thing, though. The cloud of gas completely incapacitated my three werebear mates, but for me, it was just slightly sickening. For the first few minutes, before Craze, Wild and Grave succumbed to the fog, they were retching. Three enormous, musclebound bear-shifters who I’d personally seen fight an entire army of feral werewolves were no match for some gas. Watching them fall on the ground, curl up, and in the case of Wild, literally start to cry… well, it made me realize exactly how fragile we all are, even if we don’t seem to be, flesh can only take so much before it starts to fall apart.
Grave was out long before the other two. He’d gotten so much smoke in his lungs before our illfated escape attempt that he didn’t last more than a few seconds after chaos exploded around us. And after that, it all happened so fast that it’s hard to keep straight.
All I knew was that it was falling apart. Everything was – my whole life, my whole strange, new life – was collapsing around me. I had to do something, anything, but what the hell could I do? Panic swelled up inside my stomach, turning my guts in what I can only describe as a rolling boil, the kind that’s just right for dumping a bunch of spaghetti in to cook.
But it was all falling apart in front of my eyes. Everything we’d fought for, everything that I myself had changed my entire life for was going up in flames. Or no, not even flames. It was just all going up in smoke.
Everything was falling apart right in front of my eyes.
And God had they ever fallen apart. Grave went first, and Craze followed right afterward. His dry heaving was so violent I thought he must’ve broken his back. I held his hand, and he watched my eyes as his faded closed. And that is the right word for it – faded. He hadn’t fallen unconscious, he hadn’t collapsed, nothing that dramatic. He’d just squeezed my hand and stared into my eyes and then slowly the expression on his face slipped away. I felt his grip weaken, watched his eyes close and his mouth slacken.
Wild went next, but his slip was more terrifying, as it wasn’t so much a slip as it was a violent eruption. He’d been trying to keep the smoke out of Craze’s face, but when that stopped working, he’d tried something like CPR. He’d cover Craze’s mouth, take a breath through my shirt and breathe into him. This went on for what felt like eternity, but it never did any good. I sat there, watching, holding one of my mate’s hands while he tried to save another of them.
I don’t think that ever in my life, not even when I was staring face to face with my psychopathic ex-boyfriend who turned out to be a werewolf, that I’d ever felt that hopeless… that helpless.
“Oh my God,” I heard in a voice that echoed through my head just like it bounced off the stone walls of our prison. It was nasally, high-pitched, and carried more than a hint of malice. “Do I have to do everything here? Why can’t my idiot father manage to gas three bears right?”
I stood up, forcing my head above the gas, and trying to get to my feet. As I did, Wild’s hand slipped from mine, and I knew that if he wasn’t dead, it wouldn’t be long. I managed to choke out a half-formed question about who was there with us and what was going on, but I’m sure it didn’t make any sense to anyone listening. Hell, it was even garbled and half-coherent in my own head.
“And you are still alive?” the voice was familiar somehow, but at the same time, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was her, that girl, the one who led me into the woods in the first place. “Forget killing bears, he can’t even manage to kill a human. Of all the damn things.” She let the rest of her air out in a long, irritated huff. “Well, whatever, just bring them all. I’ll deal with it after I eat.”
The casual way she spoke alarmed me, even in my panic addled, half-conscious state. Turning toward the source of the sound, I caught a glimpse of the girl that started all of this, and oddly, she looked far more human than Todd. Ghostly pale, yes, and with teeth far bigger than they ever should have been in a girl her age. It was just her humanity that made her even more unnerving, unsettling… and maybe there was a dash of stomach-churning hatred in there too.
My eyes were as fuzzy and confused as my thoughts, but I still managed to keep my feet underneath me for a few moments – just long enough to catch her icy, cold gaze for a moment. She cocked her head to the side, a bit like an interested dog, and snorted at me. “Well,” she said a second later, “I guess you did have enough balls to chase me into the woods a month ago. I don’t know why I thought you wouldn’t have enough to stay alive for at least a little while.”
“Why…?” I managed to splutter. My voice didn’t sound like my own, but there was something coming back to me. As I stood there, with my head finally clearing of that smoke, and my panic was pushed aside by adrenaline, I knew that if I didn’t do something right there and then, I’d be dead.
Not just me, either. My three mates, who I wasn’t sure were even still alive at that point, would certainly be dead. And not just them either. My thoughts turned to all the helpless cubs, to the young bear-shifters I’d met only passingly, only briefly, but who for some reason, I’d come to love anyway. I felt like there was an entire world resting in the balance. And I felt—no, not felt, knew—that if I didn’t do something right the hell then, I might as well kiss everything goodbye.
And besides, I felt like I owed it to the bears. Hell, I felt like I owed it to myself to stand tall and fight.
Fight again. Hopefully for the last time.
To this day, I don’t know how I did it, or even where the strength came from, or even the capacity. I took one glance down, spared a half-second for each of my mates, and then with the blood pumping in my head like a locomotive going off the rails and bashing through a concrete wall, I lunged.
One of my desperately grasping hands caught a wad of straight hair and my other swiped around like I was trying to claw her face. My nails dragged hot, red lines across her pallid face.
“You’re gonna regret that!” a shriek let me know that if I hadn’t done any damage, at least I’d hurt her. Or if I hadn’t actually hurt the creature, I’d at least got her attention. And if I’m being totally honest, it did feel kinda good.
But she wasn’t lying. Red-hot pain shot through my shoulder and snaked around in my chest as she twisted my arm around behind my back. I felt pricks in my wrist and then her icy breath on my neck. It slid underneath my shirt, leaving a trail of goos
ebumps so cold they burned.
“I’m done with this bitch,” her cold voice said. “Do something, you idiots! Now! Do something or I’ll kill both of you too!”
Even with the ache in my arm, I wrenched around and slung my forehead right into the bridge of the woman’s nose. I shuddered when what should have been a warm gush turned out to be cold and slick. I doubted it was even red, but the smell was something else entirely. It wasn’t coppery or metallic like normal blood, it was almost sickeningly sweet in a way that reminded me of antifreeze.
Another hand – claw more like – clutched my arm roughly. That’s the first time I was aware that my icy friend had help. It didn’t matter though, not then. I was a caged animal, my mates were slipping. If we were going to survive, we had to get out of there right the hell then.
One of the overseers grunted some half-formed words, but I couldn’t understand them. Instead, I just cracked my captor on the nose again with my forehead and whirled around with an outstretched fist. Somehow I surprised one of them enough to crack his cheekbone with my clenched fist. He let out a sound halfway between howling and yelping, but whatever it was, I did enough damage to get him to release me.
I wrenched away, still reeling from the after effects of the smoke on my system, and stumbled toward where my mates were still lying.
Or at least, last I knew they’d still been there.
“Craze?” I called out. “Wild? Grave? Where…?”
I never saw her coming.
Like a damn flash of light, the wolf girl flew into my side, knocking the air out of my lungs and driving me straight into the nearby wall where I hit with a heavy, painful thunk. I screeched so loud it hurt my own ears, but that was nothing compared to the noise I made when she gave me a lash across the back with what must’ve been claws.