The Bear's Nanny

by Amy Star

  Not that it really slowed them down.

  They carried on as they had been, regardless of an inability to take photos. Even if she couldn’t take pictures, there were still plenty of things Andy wanted to show off. Like the tree house deep in the woods, with the rope leading up to the house and the pole to slide back down to the ground. Or the tangle of berry bushes that had wrapped around each other in an almost perfect circle, with a gap in the thorny branches just big enough to crawl through and stare up at the sky.

  The night was calm after that, for the most part. Every so often they saw Malik or Rose in the distance, but all seemed peaceful. Eventually Andy turned the camera around so it hung down her back, so it banged against her shoulders rather than her chest as she loped from place to place.

  It wasn’t until later that things took a turn for the strange, and then a further turn for the awful.

  It was late in the night as Andy squinted through the trees, before she gestured carelessly for Ainslie to follow her, flapping one hand at her. “Come on,” she commanded, her tone distracted. “There’s something by the road. I want to see what it is; this is private property.”

  Ainslie fell into step behind her, and it was as they got closer to the tree line that they could see that it was a car. Ainslie squinted at it in bemusement, wondering why it seemed so familiar, only to nearly walk right into Andy as she ground to a halt.

  “That’s Maria’s car,” Andy stated, staring at it with wide eyes. Her tone sounded slightly muddled, as if she wasn’t sure whether she was confused, concerned, or annoyed, and so she landed at a complicated intersection between all three of them. The sort of intersection that didn’t have enough stop signs and where everyone always got traffic violations.

  Ainslie glanced from Andy to the car and back again. “You’re sure?” she asked slowly, taking a few steps closer to it, though she had never paid enough attention to what sort of car Maria drove to be able to recognize it on the spot.

  “Positive,” Andy replied, nodding once, just a sharp jerk of motion. “I’ve seen it tons of times. I recognize the beads hanging over the mirror.”

  Indeed, as Ainslie peered through one of the windows, she saw a string of beads draped over the rearview mirror.

  “What’s she doing here?” Andy asked, her tone rising with unease. “She’s never wanted to come along before. Why would she want to now? And if she wanted to why didn’t she just tell my dad?”

  “What’s the quickest way back to the house?” Ainslie asked, in lieu of an answer to any of Andy’s actual questions.

  Once again, Andy gestured for Ainslie to follow her before she turned on her heel and broke into a sprint into the woods with Ainslie following hot on her heels.

  As they were emerging from the trees around the backside of the cow pasture, a wolf started to howl, but it was unsteady and high-pitched and lasted for only a moment; Paisley, not Rose.

  Andy’s steps stuttered for a split second and then she put on a burst of speed that should have been impossible, and Ainslie tore after her.

  As they got closer to the pen the girls stayed in, everything was chaos. Jackson was sprawled out on the grass, looking like someone had clobbered him over the back of the head to get him out of the way. Maria was standing on the lowest rail of the fence, leaning over the top of it. She had a catch-pole like a dogcatcher, the rope end of it cinched around Paisley’s neck. As Paisley growled and thrashed, Lily snarled and gnawed at the rope, gradually fraying it between her teeth.

  The world seemed to slow down as everything Ainslie had seen in Maria’s house began to slot into place. Subject Grey; a wolf that still had a lot of growing to do. Subject Black; a bear that, while still growing, was considerably larger than Subject Grey. And a client who wanted… something made from the hide of a child who just happened to also be able to turn into a wolf. And Maria, who was willing to provide that pelt.

  The world snapped back into clarity as Andy demanded, “What are you doing?” and in that moment, it didn’t matter that she was neither a wolf nor a bear; her ferocity could put both to shame.

  The catch-pole fell from Maria’s hands as she whipped around to face Andy, her eyes wide, shock painted across her features. No sooner did the catch-pole hit the ground than Lily tugged it over Paisley’s head and both of them scrambled over to the far side of the pen.

  Andy crashed into Maria, wrenching her off the fence rail and throwing her down to the grass. They scuffled for a moment, until Maria hurled Andy aside and started to sit up.

  Ainslie moved on autopilot, acting on instinct before Maria had a chance to get near Andy. Ainslie picked up a rock off of the ground—it was sitting in the grass near Jackson and there was blood on one edge, but she was a bit too tunnel-visioned to process those details just then—and she stalked across the grass. As Maria was preparing to push herself to her feet from her knees, Ainslie lifted the rock and brought it down over the back of Maria’s head.

  Maria seemed to crumple in slow motion, her arms going limp at her sides and her torso tumbling forward. She hit the grass with a dull, meaty thump. Ainslie watched it happen as if she couldn’t quite process it. As if her nerves had all gone numb, her fingers went slack and the rock fell from her hand, landing quietly in the grass.

  Slowly Andy sat up, and on her hands and knees, she shuffled closer to Maria’s body. Her voice was very calm as she stated, “She isn’t breathing.” She rolled Maria over and ducked her head down, and noted quietly, “And I don’t hear a heartbeat.” She looked at the rock, and then over to where Jackson was still splayed out in the grass. “Does that mean he’s…?” She trailed off, as if asking the question would make it true.

  Finally, Ainslie snapped back into the moment, turning and making her way to Jackson’s side. She pressed two fingers to the pulse point on his neck, and she watched his chest rise and fall.

  When she looked up, Lily and Paisley had gathered at her end of the pen, peering at her anxiously through the rails of the fence.

  “He’s alright,” she informed them. Granted, no one would know for certain until he woke up, but she was hopeful that he simply had a concussion. Lily and Paisley both relaxed, though Andy looked only moderately comforted. At her age, though, she likely already knew that head injuries were more complicated than that.

  The underbrush rustled, and everyone tensed as they turned to face it, only to relax again when Malik and Rose emerged. They froze a few yards away as they took in the sight before them.

  Finally, Ainslie observed flatly, “You both missed quite a party.”

  Andy giggled unsteadily behind her hands. She sounded and looked a great deal like she was using the slightly hysterical laughter as an excuse not to burst into tears right there on the lawn.

  Carefully Malik prowled closer to Jackson, and Ainslie assured him, “He’s alive. Andy and I are going to bring him back into the house.” As it was, she suspected both of them needed a bit of space to gather their composure and finish compartmentalizing the night’s events into the proper boxes. She knew she did, at least, though she wasn’t sure she would actually be able to.

  Andy scrambled back to her feet in reply and carefully, she and Ainslie began to heft Jackson off of the ground. It wasn’t the least awkward thing either of them had done, but considering they were the only two people there that were both conscious and in possession of hands, they made it work. When they were halfway between the pen and the barn, Ainslie paused, glancing towards the pen to call, “I’ll explain what happened when we can have an actual conversation.”

  Malik dipped his head once in agreement and turned his head towards Maria’s body. Ainslie watched as she and Andy retreated, walking backwards as she held the bulk of Jackson’s weight under his arms, and as she watched, Rose paced around the outside of the pen before laying down beside it to keep watch and Malik seized Maria’s body by one arm between his teeth and began to drag it towards the woods.

  Ainslie refrained from contemplating the fac
t that there was a body because she had killed someone. That wasn’t something she was ready to think about just then, even if it had been in defense of the girls. That was just not something she was ready to think about, so she turned her attention back towards getting Jackson back into the house and making sure that Andy was alright.

  *

  “Are you alright?”

  Ainslie handed Andy a mug, and she peered into it curiously before taking a sip of the cocoa.

  “I guess,” she answered, her voice a low mumble. Slowly, she slid a glance up to Ainslie. “Are you?”

  “I guess,” Ainslie parroted back at her wryly. Her fingers were curled around her own mug, though hers was filled with coffee and a healthy dash of whiskey. Not enough to get drunk, of course, but hopefully enough to make her nerves stop jangling like a set of keys.

  Andy nodded slowly in understanding and they lapsed into silence, watching Jackson intently and slowly sipping from their mugs.

  Within twenty minutes of getting him back into the house and depositing him on the living room couch, Jackson began to stir. He recognized Andy and Ainslie on sight and when Ainslie asked him a few questions about his name, the date, and the location, he could answer them, and Ainslie could practically see the knot of tension between Andy’s shoulders unravel.

  He was probably okay, even if he couldn’t quite remember what had happened for a chunk of the night. Despite that, Ainslie kept him awake first by explaining what had happened and assuring him that everyone was alright, and then by prodding him into regaling her with stories of the past.

  Andy helped, asking questions here and there even if they were stories she had already heard before. At least until she fell asleep in her seat. Ainslie dragged a blanket over her and let her be, and she continued carrying on quietly with Jackson.

  She didn’t really want to go to sleep. Considering everything that had happened that night, she was willing to bet that she was not going to have a good night’s rest.

  So, she rather shamelessly used Jackson as an excuse. Not that she was inclined to feel guilty about it, considering she was pretty sure the standard operating procedure for head injuries was to keep the injured party awake to be sure nothing was going to suddenly go wrong.

  CHAPTER 14

  When at last the sun rose, the girls were all asleep, and everyone was fully dressed once again, Rose took over watching over Jackson despite his grumbling and grousing, and Malik gestured for Ainslie to follow him outside.

  She followed him without argument, and they took a detour by the barn so Malik could grab a shovel and hand a second one to Ainslie, and she knew with sudden clarity what they were going to be doing.

  Silently, she followed him into the woods a short way, until they reached the point that Malik had dropped Maria’s body the night before. Ainslie tried not to look, but there wasn’t much of a choice. Even so, she did her best to keep her back to the body as she and Malik began to dig.

  In between shovels of dirt, Ainslie explained what had happened the night before. She explained about finding the car and the run back to the barn, hearing Paisley howl—the same howl that had brought Rose and Malik back to the yard—and the sight they had discovered when they got back.

  She explained how Maria had a catch-pole and was trying to lasso Paisley with it without much success, how Andy tackled her, and how she beat Maria over the head with the rock to keep her from going after Andy. And she explained the missing pieces of the puzzle she had managed to put together about Maria’s intent.

  And afterwards, Malik seemed… surprised, upset, but not that surprised. Not as surprised as Ainslie thought he should have been, considering someone he had known for years evidently was willing to capture, kill, and skin his daughters for their animal pelts.

  When she pointed that out, Malik sighed slowly and began to explain.

  “There are people known as hunters,” he explained quietly. “People who have decided that it’s their job to get rid of people like me and my family for being what we are. It doesn’t pay anything on its own, so sometimes they try to make some under-the-table money off of it instead. And since they don’t really look at us and see us as human beings, I guess they don’t really think much of skinning us like animals. Even if they’ve known us for years.”

  “Why did it take her so long to do anything?” Ainslie wondered. Her arms were beginning to ache from digging, but at least it was a decent distraction from everything else that was trying to press on her thoughts just then.

  “She probably refrained from doing anything until she had a client to make it worthwhile, and that client wanted a wolf pelt. At a guess, Maria knew that my mother-in-law was too big for her to have a chance at killing.”

  They lapsed into silence after that as they dug and as Ainslie tried to wrap her mind around the idea that someone might want to kill the family she had come to love, simply for monetary gain. She couldn’t get it to fit in any logical capacity no matter what angle she tried to come at it from, and soon enough she gave up on the endeavor.

  By the time the hole was big enough, it felt as if they had been digging for half the day, though as she looked up at the sky between the bare branches, it looked as if it was still plausibly breakfast time. Ainslie stepped back as Malik dumped the body into the hole, and when they began shoveling dirt back into it, it went much quicker.

  “Will anyone report her missing?” Ainslie wondered eventually, as she followed Malik back towards the house. If the entire family was going to need to uproot and move somewhere off the radar, she would appreciate knowing in advance. She would go with them, of course, but she would appreciate having time to pack and say goodbye to Carrie.

  He shook his head slowly after a moment of thought. “Probably not,” he replied. “She doesn’t have any family that I’m aware of, and from everything I’ve heard, hunters tend to mostly socialize with other hunters.”

  “So, if one of them goes missing, basically their entire social circle knows why,” Ainslie guessed. True enough, she didn’t know much about were-animals or their lives, but she could still put the pieces together when they were laid out in front of her.

  “And knows they can’t really report it,” Malik confirmed. “As far as the law is concerned, were-animals don’t exist, so the law tends to just look at them as murderers.”

  “They are murderers,” Ainslie pointed out, her tone sharp and insistent.

  Obviously, Malik didn’t argue that point. It wasn’t as if he was going to suddenly try to argue that he and his family didn’t count as real people. It was patently ridiculous and everyone knew it.

  They didn’t say much else before they got back to the house. Ainslie made a beeline for the shower once she was inside, and once she was clean and dressed once again, she headed for the nearest comfortable, horizontal surface and fell asleep. Discomfort or not, she was exhausted.

  Just as expected, though, she didn’t sleep particularly well. She dreamed, over and over again, of the sound of bone cracking under a stone’s weight. It was a wet, meaty crunch, and it replayed in Ainslie’s mind over and over.

  She woke up every so often as Paisley or Lily cried in shifts, but they were always quiet again before Ainslie could even get up. Each time, she simply rolled over again and closed her eyes once more. By the time Malik woke her up to tell her they were getting in the car and heading home, she hardly felt like she had slept at all. She couldn’t imagine how everyone else felt.

  THE FINAL CHAPTER

  As they drove back to the house, Malik waited until Andy, Lily, and Paisley were all very firmly asleep in the back seat before he slid Ainslie a brief, sidelong glance and wondered, “Are you alright?” His voice was low and careful, as if he was coaxing a shy puppy out of the house for the first time.

  “I killed someone,” she stated blankly, staring out the windshield as she said it. There was no particular tone to her voice. If there was a particular way she was supposed to feel, she didn’t know what that was,
and presumably she wasn’t feeling it. She settled on “numb” for the time being. It seemed like a safe place to be just then.

  Malik’s voice was unexpectedly firm as he replied, “You kept my girls safe. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all you did.”

  “But—”

  Malik’s grip on the wheel tightened with both hands, until the leather began to creak and his knuckles went white and bloodless. “She was going to kill Paisley if she got a chance.” Ainslie had never heard Malik angry before, and there was something slightly unsettling about it, after everything else that had happened.

  At the same time, it was the anger of a father worried for his children, so she couldn’t exactly say she could fault him for it. “Lily, too, if she got in the way. Maybe even Jackson if he woke up too soon. You stopped her from doing that.”

  Ainslie supposed she couldn’t argue with that. More than that, she didn’t really want to get into an argument just then. She reached across the center console instead, curling her hand over top of Malik’s hand nearest to her. Gradually, his grip on the steering wheel loosened again, until he pulled one hand off the wheel, instead lacing their fingers together on top of the center console.