by Lynn Red
Another footstep. They were coming slower than before, and unevenly. He’d been hurt, or at least dazed, or something.
But the sound was enough.
She rolled onto her back pointed somewhere in the direction of the noise, and shot. The six rounds exploded, flame licking out in the darkness like six bursts of thunder.
The last one rang out, muffled by the density of the forest around her. She felt her breath, hot in her chest, painful and aching. She heard her own blood pumping in her temples, and then she smelled it.
That same singed fur and cooked meat smell that she’d first been introduced to when she blasted that werewolf? Yeah, that.
A second later, another thud. This one though, was no footstep.
She felt arms around her, four of them. She heard hobbling, and her hand and shoulder throbbed from where she’d been pushed back into the dirt. But right then? It was all a blur, a confused, painful, horrible, wonderful blur.
There were what seemed like a thousand voices around her, all of them talking to her, two pairs of hands holding her.
“Chopper was my only idea,” she heard Draven say.
“N... no,” Jill muttered, through a pair of busted lips, using lungs that flared every time she took in air. “Rogue... King,” she hissed. “My cabin... radio.”
She blinked, looking through barely opened eyes as Rogue studied the sky. “Yeah, not far from here. Quarter mile, maybe. We should run though, they’ll be after us. That explosion I’m sure will have guards swarming soon, I—”
Jill, in a dazed, cloudy haze, reached out and touched a finger to his lips. “If we can get to the... the cabin, I can get my... my friend. He’s ten...” she felt herself fading but fought back. “Ten minutes away. Emergency... contact.”
*
“This is gonna be a hell of a trick,” Jill heard her friend Jacques’s gentle patois cut through her on-again-off-again consciousness. “I think I can make it work though. You sure she’s all right?”
“We treated her worst wounds,” King said in his soft, powerful way.
“She’s had some stuff that’ll make her heal, don’t worry.” Draven added that bit, which worried her a little, but Jill wasn’t in any condition to say or do much of anything except moan a little, and kind of half-open her eyes. What he said was true – he’d given her some kind of serum that tasted like rotten ass, but got her numb enough that the cracked ribs didn’t hurt quite as much.
“Hey, Jacques,” she said haltingly. Whatever Draven poured down her mouth had the welcome effect of dulling the pain, but also made her feel like she was floating. “You doin... okay?”
Her pilot snickered at his babbling friend. “Doin’ fine. Better than you.”
She heard the blades whipping through the air. She heard cubs tittering around, and she felt arms – how many, she couldn’t tell, but she figured it was both of them. Both of her mates. “Am I okay?” she asked as consciousness faded again.
“He says he can get us out,” Rogue said, his tone belying his disbelief.
“I said I’d try,” Jacques said. “But we’re gonna be flyin’ low. Even this cargo chopper ain’t used to carrying this much. Should be fine, though. I been through worse.”
She felt the lurch of the ground disappearing, and closed her eyes, pulling close to whoever was holding her. She felt something long, and thick and cold against her neck. “Rogue?” she asked, remembering that pendant. “Is that...?”
He hushed her with a kiss. A kiss that felt safe. A kiss that made her feel protected, like everything really was somehow okay.
It was also a kiss that let her close her eyes.
As the chopper bobbed and pitched, she vaguely wondered where they were going. Options were limited, but somehow? She just knew they’d be okay.
-17-
“I told you. If you listen, the universe will tell you just what to do. All you gotta do is hear it, and believe it.
-Jill
Jill rolled over, her side throbbing, her head pounding, and slowly opened her eyes. The thick padding around her kept the pain to a minimum, but when she saw King examining the mini-fridge filled with Kit-Kats and tiny liquor bottles, she had to bite really hard on her lip to keep from laughing.
“Why are they so small?” he asked Rogue, who was draped across two huge papa-san chairs that still had tags from the Pier One Imports down the road from the hotel Fred had managed to finagle. One entire floor of the local Stop N Drop filled with nothing but displaced werebear cubs trying to figure out life in Santa Barbara.
When Tripp found out Jill had come back from her little nature trip early, and had a bunch of friends needing a place to crash, he offered without asking a single question. Turned out? Tripp wasn’t such a bad guy after all, apparently, and the Stop N Drop was a lot nicer than Jill imagined.
Although in retrospect, after the slight disaster that was bears trying to learn how showers worked, maybe he should have asked a few more questions.
“They’re expensive,” Jill said. “If you take them out a sensor,” she sighed, laughing softly enough that it didn’t hurt as the massive bear took a handful of the diminutive vodka bottles out of the fridge and set them on the table. “That probably just cost me about sixty bucks.”
King wasn’t listening. His entire attention was caught up in arranging those plastic bottles so that the images on the front – a picture of some vaguely royal looking person with a pointy beard – all lined up exactly.
“You’re supposed to drink them,” Rogue said, helpfully. He turned back to the television and laughed way too hard at Barney Fife dropping his gun belt. In the four days since they’d taken up at the hotel, Jill couldn’t count how many times he’d laughed at that exact same thing. The only thing he’d spent more time guffawing at was Fred Sanford having fake heart attacks. “He’s faking again!” Rogue would bark, and then laugh so hard he turned purple as he shouted “Elizabeth!” at the TV.
King kept on arranging the bottles.
Down the hall, some cubs were bouncing around, which was fine, because after the third round of broken box springs, Tripp asked if there was anything he could do. Rogue, King and Jill all came to the decision that maybe letting them slowly acclimate to society, maybe introducing beds later, would be a good idea.
The look on that poor guy’s face was so ecstatic Jill thought he had either just gotten a massage, or maybe had the money-saving version of a climax.
But, he kept on keeping on. It couldn’t be easy to have a hotel full of bears that you don’t know are bears and not just really badly behaved children. To Tripp’s credit, he never asked questions, and never got more than a little weird with the come-ons.
That he actually had the balls to try an actual pick up line on Jill when she was standing between two giants as the cubs filled the pool? That made her almost want to go on another date with the guy.
Almost.
King had moved on from arranging the bottles to carefully opening each one. He made sure they didn’t move, because for whatever reason, he was intent on keeping his beautiful plastic sculpture looking perfect.
“Did he drink them yet?” Rogue asked as the F-Troop theme song began to play, and he turned his attention to singing along. “Let me know when he starts drinking it,” he added, after the song was through.
“Uh... he’s starting,” Jill said, sitting up and rubbing her side. Apparently, a little bit of bear healing had made its way into her bloodstream, because she had come back from a full set of cracked ribs with incredible speed. The doctors at Santa Barbara General had all been flabbergasted when she got out of bed on the second day of her stay, and started to refuse morphine on the third.
Okay, maybe the fourth. But who’s counting?
Rogue and King had been as amazed as the doctors were at her healing when Jill started fishing in the television. They’d tried to join in, but apparently couldn’t find the joy in casting along with Ray Scott in old re-runs of Bass Masters without being l
ooped on pain killers.
But they’d been there. Both of them out of their element, both of them nervously pacing, and pretty obviously terrified, but they stayed by her side the whole time. One slept while the other stood guard like something terrible was going to happen. Then that one went to sleep and the other held her hand.
In the end, Jill couldn’t believe that somehow, someway, she was the center of their world.
She smiled, remembering the way King had stroked her cheek when she first woke up, and how Rogue held her as she took her first stumbling steps. And then she remembered how big the doctor’s eyes were when she sauntered down the hall with her little IV cart as a walker, and presented herself, asking to be checked out on the sixth day of her stay.
“That is...” King squeezed one of the tiny vodka bottles, because for some reason just pouring it wasn’t good enough. “Awful, but it’s...”
“Keep going,” Rogue chided from his throne. “You have to do all of them at once.”
“What is this?” Jill asked. “The bear version of a frat house?”
“To-ga! To-ga! To-ga!” Rogue shouted, laughing at his own brilliance. “That’s the right movie, right?”
Jill smiled fondly again, and nodded. “Yeah, you got it. Now I’m waiting for you to start throwing ice cream and taking off your shirt.”
“Why would he do that?” King cut in. He was on his fifth little vodka, and had a deep, comical furrow in his brow. “Ice cream tastes good.”
Rogue sighed, and for a moment, Jill thought she was caught in the middle of one of Rogue’s ancient sitcoms, except instead of Sheriff Taylor and Barney Fife, she was right between two guys that most people only see the likes of on calendars filled with fake firemen. “It’s a joke,” he said, “remember how those work?”
King drained, and squeezed, the last two tiny bottles, and had started squinting. “I know,” he said. “It just wasn’t funny.”
Rogue scoffed a very dramatic fake laugh, and then when Jill started snorting, he gave in and started with the real honking, seal-like laughter she’d grown accustomed to over the past few days.
“How’s the vodka?” Jill asked. “You kinda downed all that pretty quickly, you sure you’re okay?”
“He weighs about three-fifty. I think he can handle some baby shots. Hey, big guy, is there anything else in there?”
“Why can’t we just go to the store like normal people? We coulda bought half the stock of that place on the corner for what his experiment with sorority drinking just cost.”
“Do they have Fat Tire?” Rogue asked, rolling over like a hookah smoking caterpillar to ask.
Jill quirked a half smile in his direction. “It’s a corner store in the United States, of which you all are now a part, and it sells beer. Yes, it has Fat Tire.”
“You’ve never been there, how do you know?”
“Because everywhere has Fat Tire. I’ll even go get it if you want, although it’s kind of sad that two giant bears are going to let their busted up mate go buy beer for them.”
Oh my God I can’t wait to see these two try to navigate an exchange of currency, she thought, getting a little giddy at the idea. This is so mean, but... shit I’m not lying about that bar tab he just rang up.
A look of suspicion came over Rogue’s face, his stunning eyes darkening slightly. The dimple in his left cheek went a tad deeper, and Jill felt a quailing in her stomach. King stood up and frowned. “Why do I feel like I should be having more fun?” he asked.
“Well at least you moved on from the loincloths when we came back to civilization. As much as I liked them, I doubt you’d be able to convince one of Santa Barbara’s finest that you weren’t a crazy person.”
“You’re Santa Barbara’s finest,” King said in a flat tone.
He didn’t catch his slip of the tongue.
“That’s very sweet,” Jill said, “and I can almost see you two exchanging a high-five over that one, but I don’t want to have to explain to Tripp why there’s no liquor left in any of his tiny fridges, nor do I want to pay for it. Come on.”
Rogue and King exchanged a glance, Rogue shrugged and flicked off the TV. As soon as Jill stood, she winced, ever so slightly, and before she took her next step, there was one arm from each of her bears, gently around her waist.
The walk to The Corner Emporium was short, even with Jill’s unsure hobbling, and the store was far less impressive than the name would indicate. For a second upon entering, Jill considered talking her bears into trying a vast array of hobo wines – Wild Irish Rose, maybe some Boone’s Farm – but decided that something that could turn normal men into hooting beasts? Probably not the best thing to give to men who could do that anytime they wanted.
“There’s... so much,” Rogue said, his voice an awe-struck whisper.
This is absolutely ridiculous, Jill thought, stifling a laugh.
King, for his part, immediately went to work turning every single bottle on the nearest shelf so that the labels were lined up, facing outward. The clerk at the counter, a slight man, bald on the top and round around the middle, wore a slightly frayed cardigan, and was watching the spectacle with just about the same look on his face that Rogue had when he walked past the beer cooler to the shelf filed with singles from all over the world.
Jill, sensing his confusion, shambled over and propped herself on the counter.
“They’re from Virginia,” she said.
The clerk look more confused. “I mean, like, in the woods Virginia.”
“Oh,” he said, in a long, drawn out way. “You mean like the part of Virginia that may as well be a different planet?”
“You have no idea,” she said with a grin.
“Whoa!” she turned back to the pair of man-bear-children, just in time to see Rogue teetering around with about forty bottles in his arms. “Holy... hey, can you get him a basket or something?”
With a heavy sigh and a little less enthusiasm than she’d like to have seen, the old guy rounded the counter and helped Rogue fill a shopping cart. As the man filled the basket, the bemused bear wandered off again, chasing some other squirrel.
King had straightened an entire row of bourbon bottles, and was just finishing his adjustments to the Wild Turkey section when he stood up very straight, very stiff, and then just started laughing.
“I thought you said they were from Virginia,” the shop keep said pointedly. “Not the damn loony bin.”
Jill bit down on her lip, once again trying to keep from cracking up like an idiot. Of all the trials they’d been through, all the pain and the fear, to think that the biggest obstacle to their getting on with life was safely escorting these two through the process of buying beer without dying from laughter?
Things could definitely, definitely be a lot worse, she thought.
At least Rogue had enough experience with the human world to know he had to pay for the stuff he was gathering, instead of just smiling at the panic-stricken turkey on the label and trying to walk out the front door.
“This... all together?” The shop keep looked slightly amazed, but she knew he’d seen some rough characters walk through here before. Jill just nodded.
“They’re trying new things,” she said.
“Do you have Fat Tire?” Rogue asked, over top of Jill and the clerk’s exchange. “I didn’t see any.”
“Ahhh,” the old man groaned, pinching one of his eyes up in what might’ve been a practiced tic. “We’re out. Truck usually comes Thursday, but it’s running late. Sorry about that.”
Rogue let out a long, low grumble, and caught Jill’s eye with a look so smug she could have set him up with Tripp and they’d be able to float an iceberg with their combined smug might.
“He said they were out of it,” Jill said, “not that they didn’t carry it.”
Rogue kept right on looking smug. “It feels good to be right.”
Jill rolled her eyes so hard they could’ve clacked against her teeth.
As she took out
her credit card and scanned an absolutely ungodly amount of booze through, she couldn’t help but smile when she felt first Rogue’s hands, and then King’s, on the small of her back. I bet this guy thinks this is some weird cousin-dating circle, she thought with a little grin.
That tiny, impish grin grew a lot wider when King got a little adventurous – apparently drinking a bunch of baby shots made him randy – and stuck a pair of fingers down the loose waistband of Jill’s comfy cotton trousers. She twisted away, but at the same time, kinda wanted to just let go, let the wild ride just keep right on.
Then again, a PDA ticket probably wasn’t the best way to make her California homecoming memorable.
With a box hoisted onto each of Rogue’s shoulders, and a paper bag in King’s arms, the unlikely trio made their way back to the Stop N Drop, though it was much slower than the trip to the store. Each step, each moment that they walked, Jill watched her two bears, their muscles moving under their shirts, their shoulders rising and falling with every breath they took.
This, she thought, is a much better way to remember coming home than getting thrown in the can for making out in a corner store.
-18-
“That’s probably not a good idea.”
Jill
With the cubs asleep in their multitude of rooms, and the Spectravision turned off from the front desk – Arrow discovered the thrill of pay-per-view the night before – Jill, Rogue and King made their way downstairs just after midnight. The agreement was that they could swim after hours if they kept it quiet, and didn’t make a mess.
Tripp really did turn out to be a pretty good guy.
She slid below the surface, letting the cool water lap away the soreness in her sides. Without her bandages, walking was harder, but in the water, she didn’t feel anything but free.
That’s not true. She felt a pair of hands glide around her hips, and then she spun around to find one very intense looking bear with one green eye and one amber one, staring straight into her soul.