Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Broken Pine Bears Book 1)

by Lynn Red

  Before anyone could say anything more, King was out the door – completely naked of course – and vanished into the night.

  “That was, uh, abrupt,” Jill said, trying to hide her sudden attack of nerves. It probably didn’t do much good, and Rogue almost certainly wasn’t falling for it, but he played along. “You get used to it,” he said. “That and the loincloth.” A smile cracked his lips. “You can take the bear out of the forest, but you can’t take the...” he scrunched up his face.

  “No, that’s not right. You can’t take the... whatever. He’s wild, he’s different. But that’s why we’re the perfect pair.”

  “Pair?” Jill asked. “Last I counted, there were three of us.”

  -9-

  “This is about to get wild. That’s a cute joke.”

  -Rogue

  “No, Rogue,” King said to his brother as the two effortlessly plowed through the undergrowth. They’d done this same thing a thousand times and would do it a thousand more. Dodging roots and ramming through underbrush and talking was as natural to the two bears as jogging with a stroller and talking on a Bluetooth headset was to a suburban mom.

  “She’s not one of us, she can’t know our secrets.”

  “Listen to yourself,” Rogue shot back, dodging under a branch. “She shot two werewolves, hell, she even dealt with your bad sense of humor. And now you’re going to question her?”

  “Not me, but the cubs. Why would they trust a human? What would make them believe her, after what they’ve lived through?”

  Rogue thought for a second. It was a good point, but still, the mark on his chest and more importantly, the way his heart skipped a beat when he thought of Jill, told him otherwise. “You know just as well as I do that she’s the one. Why do you fight this when you take every other ridiculous prophecy and tradition without a second thought?”

  “Doesn’t it bother you that you think you know the man who shot you?”

  King’s question surprised Rogue, mostly because he never remembered saying anything. But, when you have a drug dart in your butt, odd things tend to come out. “It was just a vague memory, probably nothing. Anyway, with all the drugs that were running through me, I doubt I should believe my own eyes. I’d probably seen the face in a dream.”

  I know I’ve seen that man before, but I don’t know where. It gnawed at him even though he wouldn’t ever admit as much, at least not to King. He’d probably figure out some way to twist it back on me going to human towns and chugging down Fat Tire by the barrel. “I could use a beer,” he said, to try and lighten the mood.

  King barked a laugh, and slid over a knee-high root. “I’ll never understand you and that stuff. Honey wine is better than any of it.”

  “You’d never know, you haven’t tried any.”

  “Don’t need to,” King said. “I know the best when I taste it.”

  Like Jill, Rogue wanted to say, but decided not to press the issue, at least not right then, as the two were bounding over a hill that, when they got to the top, would give them a view of the largest lupine pack den anywhere around. “I’m sure you do,” was all the smaller, thicker bear said, with a wry grin.

  “There,” King said, pointing down to the valley below as the bears crested the hill. “Look!”

  Down below, in a depression that the lupines had dug down to a crude mixture of bedrock and dirt, the wolves were circling. The sides of the den – which was more of a pit than anything resembling a home – were lined with sticks, bones from hunted animals or hunted people. They hadn’t always been like this, but neither Rogue nor King could very well remember the time before the lupines went insane. The wild, undulating, pulsing dance of death that Rogue and King witnessed was the closest thing the lupines had to a tradition.

  “They’re grotesque and brutal,” King said, a sneer marking his face.

  “Says the bear who has strangled how many of them to death?”

  The two smiled, but only briefly.

  “This one! This one abandoned his kin!” A particularly large wolf was shouting above the din of the crowd. “This one ran from a human girl, one he was told to capture! He saw his packmate die by her hand and ran instead of fighting!”

  “I thought there was only one body? I mean, two separate attacks, but there was only one corpse after the second one. Or am I imagining things?” Rogue asked.

  King just shrugged. “Might’ve thought better than to mess with a frightened human holding a pistol?”

  Rogue turned to his brother. “You’re getting better at this humor thing all the time.”

  King smiled grimly and nodded. Below, the wolves were getting more rowdy by the second. The big one in the center, shouting, wasn’t so much commanding them as he was letting the crowd’s emotions decide his words. When he talked about killing, or death, or punishment, they whipped faster, harder, like one spirit drove all of them.

  “Should we let him live in shame?” the wolf cried, almost screeching his voice was so strained. “Or pay for blood with blood?”

  If the yelling before got them excited, the thought of killing this chained up, hissing wolf was really amazing. The one staked up, bound in chains that bit into his flesh, burning and sizzling, was smaller by a head than the pack spokesman, but he had a good bit of muscle on him. Still, with all of the wolves shifted partway between wolf and man, the prisoner wasn’t impressive compared to the rest.

  King made a move to stand up. Rogue placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, holding him in place. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Even if he is a wolf, this barbarism can’t stand,” King said.

  Rogue’s glittering eyes went cold. “Would they do the same for you? This might not look like justice, but it is to them. And besides, what’s one less lupine for us to deal with when they go berserk?”

  The taller bear relaxed, but not much. He knew his brother was right, but he hated to see purposed cruelty like this, no matter what the reason. King turned his back. “We go,” he said softly. “Leave them to their bloodlust. If this is what all the noise is from, they’ll tear into that helpless one and drink themselves senseless.”

  King turned and started back toward the clan home, but Rogue lingered just long enough to see his brother’s words come true. When the wolves turned on the prisoner, they left little more than a red mist staining the post. Rogue turned, without a sound, and followed the path his brother took moments before. When he caught up to King, the two shared a glance, and a look, but no words needed to be spoken.

  *

  Three days passed in relative tranquility.

  After their gory festival, the lupines were quiet, as always happened. King was too absorbed in planning for the coming winter – still months away, but when a bear clan is thirty strong, it’s never too early to prepare. Rogue ranged, but only in short rounds that ended every night at camp. His heart burned to be with Jill, his spirit yearned and ached for her, but he knew that she needed time to come to terms with reality, and the truth is, so did he and King.

  The two alphas spoke little, but only because there was nothing much to say. It wasn’t that Rogue and King disliked each other, it’s that they’d been so close for so long that either one could easily anticipate what the other would say, how the other would react to something. Surprises were very, very rare between the two, but whenever Rogue thought back to his dour, humorless brother attempting a joke, he couldn’t help but smile.

  His thoughts drifted as they always did when he was stationary for any time at all. He thought of Jill, and the wolves going nuts, and of the man in the helicopter whose identity was right on this tip of his tongue.

  “King?” he’d asked, one of the few times they spoke. “Do you remember any big, bald bears being taken from us?”

  King had looked at him sideways. “Why?” he’d asked.

  Rogue had just shrugged. “No reason, really, just thinking. I know I recognize the guy in the helicopter before.” He’d been gnawing his lip, like he a
lways did when he was lost in thought. “What was that one bear’s name? He was older than us, but not much. He had the scars on his face, he...”

  “Madix?” King had asked, without much interest. “But why would he shoot you? It wouldn’t make sense for him to be involved in this. Of course, it wouldn’t make sense for him to be in a helicopter in the first place. Don’t you remember his fear of heights? One of the biggest, strongest bears in the clan, and he’d never go all the way up a tree, even for the biggest beehives. He’d always refuse to look down off of cliffs, he’d...”

  King had fallen silent like remembering the past had become too much of an emotional burden for him just then. Rogue looked past the other alpha, out at the cubs below and tried to banish the thought that maybe it was Madix in that helicopter. Once his brother gave him the name, memories flooded the smaller bear, but none of them lined up.

  Madix had scars, sure, we all do, but nothing like the guy in that chopper. And why would he shoot me? It hardly makes sense. That night, he had banished those memories with enough honeywine to kill a normal person – or any person really. But to him, there was almost no effect past a little bit of pleasant dizziness and a full night of sleep.

  For a time – a blessed time, no matter how brief – the clan was normal. The cubs hunted and fished, Arrow gathered berries, Slate tried to sucker other bears into wrestling matches.

  One day stretched into two and then into three before there was any hint that change was coming. On the third day, Rogue took off before light, to “see if the wolves had calmed.” King bid him farewell with a curt nod and a gaze that lingered slightly longer than normal. Something was bothering Rogue, but there was no telling what, exactly.

  As Rogue left camp, his brother stood, thinking about calling after him, but then decided against it. If something was on Rogue’s mind, King knew he’d never get it out by asking. Rogue was never much for talking, especially about his own feelings. The older, bigger alpha remembered how Rogue took eight years before he shed a tear over the kidnappings.

  King knew he hurt, he knew that his brother probably hurt more than anyone. Along with his deep, passionate connection to his animal nature, Rogue also seemed to feel everything more keenly and sharply than any of the other clan members. He never showed his emotions, or outwardly let them affect him, but despite his gruffness and rough, slightly vulgar attitude, King knew that if any one of their number was a poet, it’d be his sworn brother.

  He scoffed a laugh, thinking of Rogue reciting some saccharine love poem. King though, he was no poet. He didn’t have the energy or the time, or... If he was being honest, the ability to feel the highs and lows of life the way Rogue did. Where Rogue was a tempest, King was a placid sea; if King was the calm, Rogue was the storm.

  But it worked.

  That’s how it always worked. Hot blood and cold mix to make better decisions. Impulse makes action, and quiet thought makes it useful.

  Without one, there could never be the other. Hot and cold, soft and hard.

  King watched Rogue as the younger bear shifted and disappeared into the woods. Without Rogue, there was no King. He sighed, heavily, waiting for the cubs to stir and the day to begin. Two are one in us, he thought, before shaking his head. No, not two. Now there are three.

  Instead of a sigh, that thought brought a wave of warm fingers running out from the center of King’s chest and down his sides. Then, he smiled.

  *

  The afternoon sun overhead heated the forest to the point of dew steaming on the leaves. Rogue was hot, his fur a blanket of insulation that he wished he didn’t have, but he was thankful for his thick hide and coat keeping the briars from cutting into him, and keeping the leaves and sticks out of his eyes.

  When he ran, he felt free. With every branch that snapped, every fallen trunk he cracked, he felt more alive, more at home.

  King avoided shifting if he could. He said it made him lose control to some small degree, and of course, control was the one thing King wanted to keep at all times, at all costs. It wasn’t losing control for Rogue though, it was letting his instincts take over; it was letting his brain stop overanalyzing and calculating for a few precious moments.

  And anyway, he found a long time before that his instincts were usually more trustworthy than his thoughts. Leave the strategies and the tactics to King. Rogue was at home with hot passion, at ease with the unreason.

  A chopper, the sound throbbing through his body, gave Rogue a moment’s pause. It was close to the ground, he thought, even though he couldn’t locate it. With a canopy as dense as this one, the thing would have to go right overhead, and anyway, at the moment he was just a bear. A really big one, of a kind that wasn’t supposed to exist in these parts for a couple hundred years, but no normal person would know that.

  That’s when the scent hit his nose.

  Jill? You’re here?

  The bear looked all around him, in something approaching a panic. Why was she here? What was she doing with a helicopter so close to the ground? She couldn’t be involved in any of this, could she?

  Rogue shook his huge head, trying to calm his nerves. Carefully, he crept forward as the throb of helicopter blades grew slower, more even in pace. It had landed, and not far away.

  Smelling the air again, the scent of Rogue’s mate had been subsumed by the stink of fuel, and the rotten aroma of – food?

  Sure enough, in a clearing that he could barely see, Jill was approaching a helicopter, and having some kind of shouted small-talk conversation with the man inside. This chopper wasn’t like the ones Rogue had seen before. This one was a gentle color of green and had a very plain identification number stenciled onto the tail of the craft.

  In the safety of his tree cover, Rogue watched his mate throw her brown hair back, and then pull it into a curly ponytail. Her long, slender form – which had a least a foot on the stocky, bearded man who hopped out to help her with the things he was handing off – drew a hot, longing breath from Rogue’s chest. He wanted her.

  No, not want – he needed her, longed for her, ached to feel her skin against his, to explore the curve of her hips with his fingertips, to taste her, to caress her... to possess her.

  But he couldn’t. Not right then. Rogue might be brazen and almost dangerously brash, but to charge out and sweep his mate up in his arms right in front of someone? That was a touch of crazy even Rogue didn’t have in him. For all he knew, Jill had been bound in a human marriage and this was her human mate – he didn’t know.

  By the time Jill began to trek back into the woods, with her companion in tow, both of them loaded down with bags, packs and whatever else they were carrying, the day began to darken. Night was coming, and even though the lupines had been calm for two nights straight, that wouldn’t last forever. If he heard howls, he couldn’t stalk his mate, no matter how much he wanted. If howls came, he had to watch them, had to try his best to contain them.

  When the first baleful moan broke through the slightly misty dusk, Rogue damned his luck.

  Duty first, he thought, turning back toward the lupine pack den where he’d watched a butchering a few nights past. Duty first, love second.

  Although, even as he loped along the path to where he knew he needed to go, he began to seriously question his priorities.

  -10-

  “Time to breathe. Just for a second.”

  -Jill

  Waking up, alone, in her own bed, was just about the last thing Jill expected. After being awakened two separate times by werewolves, and after a couple of really good, sweaty nights with those bears?

  Nothing she could do took the bears off her mind. She’d considered running back to society... hell, she’d considered a lot of things.

  But she knew she couldn’t do it. She knew this was where she belonged, that this forest, these bears, they were her family.

  She rolled over, still a little sore from some injury or another she managed to sustain at the hands of a now-dead pile of wolf fluff. Otherw
ise? She was intact, she wasn’t hurt, and more – most? – importantly, she knew that all those things she had been dreaming? They weren’t just dreams.

  She sighed, thinking back to those impossible nights, to Rogue and King, and the way they had seemed to be two souls in one body. Rogue with his easy smiles and worldly way of speaking and King with his immense power, his quiet confidence, and... well, and a sort of Tarzan-like way about him. They were two alphas, and Jill? Apparently just got herself two boyfriends so big they made her feel like a normal girl.

  Boyfriends? Jeez. No, boyfriends don’t do the things they did. Boyfriends don’t talk about alpha marks, about mating and bearing baby bears, she chuckled to herself. And boyfriends usually don’t come onto me two at a time and make me...

  Just about the only thing Jill knew for sure is that she’d never, not once in her life, screamed and writhed and pulsed and groaned like she had the night before. Then again, she’d never been with a pair of enormous werebears, either.

  The sun was already burning hot in the Appalachian forest. Steam rose in gentle wisps from evaporating dew. She looked over to where the wolf had lay dead.

  “Gone?” she asked the empty room. “Just like that?”

  She stood up, cautiously approaching the exact spot the creature slumped over and disintegrated, like she expected something to hop up and grab her. None of the quicksilver fur, not even the bone, was left. Jill reached over and plucked the flattened bullet she found among the mess – she set it on the desk the night before, but hadn’t thought much about it until just then. She climbed out of bed, still holding the silvery disc, and stooped over, crouching down with her feet flat on the ground. When she did this she thought she probably looked a little like a slightly-gangly chimpanzee, all legs and arms, and all folded up. She’d been doing it since she was a little girl.

  As she stretched, Jill turned her trophy over, examining the lines that appeared on impact. The half-dollar sized hunk of silver was smashed out like a metal pancake. She held it in her palm, letting the silver cool her skin, as she cracked open one of about a thousand super-caloric army rations that Jacques delivered. This one was marked “TUNA CASSEROLE AND POTATOES” but when she opened it, it was just sort of a lumpy, gray mass with a sheen of what might’ve been fake butter on top.