Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (22 page)

Those last words came from a trembling mouth and were punched with pauses, moans, and gasps.

All the tension built up inside her erupted with a wave of cool, then hot, then cool again. Her pulsing body tugged at Stone’s fingers, and pushed a little more juice out of herself and against Fury’s lips. He moaned deeply, and when he did, the vibration of his mouth pushed Claire to yet another level of helpless pleasure.

She squealed, she squirmed, she cried out their names. When it was all over – when the white-hot release faded into memory, Claire opened her eyes and realized that she was where she was always supposed to have been. As weird as it may sound, she’d never felt more comfortable, or more at peace.

As the three of them curled up into a big heap, and the wetness all over Claire’s thighs cooled in the gentle breeze going through the tent, she closed her eyes and counted her blessings.

Just as her consciousness began to slip, a jingling noise at the door caught Claire’s half-dreaming attention. Cleo jangled up, licked Claire right across the face, and then lapped at a childishly giggling Fury. Then she, too, joined the heap.

“Never in my life did I imagine this,” she said with a yawn. “But somehow it all makes sense.”

––––––––

T
ime had ground down to such a horrible boredom, that when Claire’s long-dead burner phone buzzed, she thought it must have been a dream.

Stone rolled over, pushing her gently off of him as the pile of bear and mate dissolved. Fury rubbed his eyes. “Not even dawn,” he said with a big yawn. “Why are we up?”

The larger, more sullen bear didn’t say much of anything – just a grunt of assent as he looked at the phone, which had been out of power for at least a week – and stepped out of the canvas flap.

“What’s with him?” Claire asked. “And how is this thing ringing?”

She picked the handset off the ground and stared at it for a second. She felt Fury shrug beside her before he sighed heavily and tromped out after his co-alpha. Though it had been cold, there hadn’t been much snow lately – only enough to dust the stubbornly attached evergreen needles. A shiver crept through Claire, prickling her skin and making her wish for all those warm, fuzzy, comfortable winter coats she’d left behind when she left her former life. And then, for some reason, she started thinking about the hot wings and beer from trivia night, which she decided immediately that she missed even more than the jackets or sleeping in a bed.

After all,
here
she had bears. Back home, she had approximately nothing.

The phone was buzzing, sure enough, as though a call was coming through. However, the screen wasn’t lit, so she wasn’t quite certain how to answer. As she held it, the phone kept right on insisting that she answer it. Feeling like something of an idiot, Claire just held the receiver to her head.

“Are you there?” It was a static voice, but clear enough. “Claire Redmon? Is that you?”

With a start, she dropped it on the ground and jumped back slightly. “What the fuck?” she asked the empty cabin.

“Hello?” the phone pleaded. “Is that you, Claire Redmon?”

Eyeing the receiver, she bent down and plucked it off the ground once again before holding it gingerly to her ear. Every ounce of sense in her body told her not to say anything – though she didn’t know how much it would matter. The helicopters had been circling for days, and the increasing paranoia shared by the bears had grown day by day. And now, with the depths of winter setting in, and Stone spending more time than not staring out into the darkness, Claire knew something bad was on the horizon.

It was that feeling she recognized from having a professor, or her boss, cold-call her in the middle of the afternoon. That feeling of paranoia that only comes from something you
know
is bad, and that you know is also completely unavoidable.

She took a deep breath. “How is my phone working?”

“Electromagnetic waves. I have taken control of one of GlasCorp’s jamming towers. You have certainly felt the tingle on your skin from time to time? As though static electricity was all around you?”

“I... yeah?”

“Yes, well,” the voice said, “that would be the field. It comes and goes during the day, but I was able to use it to manipulate the battery in your primitive communication device. And I am using the towers which you have certainly noticed in order to communicate with you on said communication device.”

There was a peculiar cadence to the caller’s voice, and a particular static she recognized as coming from those faceless soldiers who had ambushed them three times now. But at the same time, this one sounded less robotic, more like a person using his voice than a machine trying to figure out how it was supposed to work.

“Oh...kay?”

“Five-eight-one-one-nine-eight-six-two-three,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I am disconnected from GlasCorp tracking, but I had to say that to keep them from realizing they lost me. Every so often I jack back in and repeat a string of numbers so they think I’m connected.”

She started pacing and chewing on the inside of her bottom lip. “What do you mean, lost you?”

“I am one of them. Eighty-Three. We have met.”

“Why don’t you ever use contractions?”

“It is too informal,” he stated flatly. “I do not know you that well.”

For a long moment, Claire sat there with her long-dead phone pressed to her ear. And then she heard a halting click-click-click. “Are you laughing?”

“Yes,” he said. “I told a joke about the familiarity which we do not share.”

Claire scrunched her eyes, trying to figure out what was going on, but not quite able to grasp it. Outside the tent she heard a fairly intense exchange break out between the two bears. Some incomprehensible shouting in that bizarre patois they had of English and some invented language that came from the necessity of communicating without anyone knowing what they were saying to one another in their confinement.

It sounded like they were really having it out about something, but that wasn’t rare. Especially not as time wore on, and supplies were getting harder to find.

“Did you just call me to tell a joke?”

“No,” he said, still flat as anything. “I called because I have recently gained consciousness apart from the network. I am wishing to destroy the network and free my friends, although I am not sure that they would survive. In the meantime, I decided that the enslavement of your people is wrong and wish to free them. In addition, I have decided that I am going to warn you that the one you call Stone is not the one you call Stone.”

Claire closed her eyes again, processing every part of that statement in order. That proved too tall an order though, especially for her, right then. So, she did what everyone else would have done: started thinking out loud.

“Okay,” she said, mumbling. “So you gained consciousness which means you were previously unconscious? I’m guessing then all the other gasmask not-robots are—”

“Controlled by a combination of mind control devices in their respirators and also genetic experiments that resulted in our inability to function without said respirators.”

Her jaw dropped, though there was no one to see it, but she pressed on. “And the network, which sounds like a proper noun, that is—”

“The neural network that brings our orders and gives us the numbers to broadcast which control the other, lesser soldiers.”

Claire scoffed a laugh. “Why didn’t you tell me all this up front?”

“I was trying to be gentle.”

“Gentle about what? All you told me was that you were conscious, you wanted to free your friends, you wanted to free our friends and that Stone wasn’t actually Stone. What could possibly... oh,” she said, her voice low with disbelief as the fighting outside escalated further.

“Shit.”

She dropped the phone to the ground for the second time in as many minutes. That time though, she was in a straight run. “Fury!” she screamed at the top of her lungs to a bear who was somewhere she couldn’t see. “It isn’t him! It isn’t—”

“Stone?” the creature, who was a ghastly pale purple color, hissed. His back was turned, and in the early dawn light Claire could see each sinew under his muscle move with every breath the monstrosity took. The breath it drew was ragged, syrupy and rough. He had one arm raised in the air, though she couldn’t see what he held until he let out a ghoulish laugh.

Suddenly, Fury hit the ground, tossed carelessly over the creature’s head. “That was easier than I thought it... would... be.”

He started to stomp off into the woods, but then froze like a statue, sniffing the air. “That’s... you? I didn’t know about two of you.”

Back in the cabin, she heard that staticky, robotic voice screaming something. She couldn’t hear what, but it didn’t matter. There wasn’t any time for listening to anything. The only thing there was time for, was to fight.

Just seeing her mate lying on the ground, broken and bloody, was enough to put a shot of pure, unadulterated hatefire straight into Claire’s brain. She threw back her head, let the increasingly familiar sensation of muscles tightening and bones bending course through her. Still that voice was squawking on her phone, but she didn’t care. She might not really know how to fight, she may not be anywhere near as strong as this beast, but she was sure as shit going to give it her best shot.

He didn’t bother with finesse.

Grabbing a fallen tree branch off the ground, the beast took a single-handed swing at Claire. The move caught her completely off guard. A split second later, the branch splintered, cracking in half across her chest. Claire let out another roar, flinging her aching body forward as hard as she could. She crashed full-force into the monster’s stomach and flailed a wild paw at his face. She caught him, but just barely.

As the creature spun from the impact, he brought the half of the branch he was still holding down across Claire’s back. She flattened on the ground, barely managing to get back to her feet before he grabbed her by the throat and lifted her off the ground.

He squeezed. Closing his fist tight, the monster stared straight into Claire’s eyes. His were watery, yellowed and oozing some kind of puss. One of them, she noticed, was slightly lower than the other, but then again, that might’ve just been the way he was holding her.

Or it might’ve been the lack of oxygen.

Also, she noticed that the humming, static voice coming through her phone had silenced, though in its place was a different sort of whirring sound.

The creature seemed upset, and not in a “raging monster” sort of way, rather in a “slightly confused” sort of way.

His pupils were vibrating just a little, Claire noticed, and then she felt his hand. The tremble was slight, like he’d drunk too much coffee.

But it was growing nearer every second. The whirring sound, which first she thought was in her head, soon became
very
audible. The creature crushing her throat kept looking from side to side, obviously as confused as she was.

The breath in her lungs ached and burned, needing to be let out and replaced. When she tried, all she could manage was a bare, painful croak. In his panic, the creature seemed to be squeezing tighter and tighter.

Black stars opened in her vision, splotches of unseeing that fizzled inside her head. Blood pounded in her temples, but all she could think of was Fury. He was just lying there, helpless.

“Hunh?” the creature grunted, his knees buckling under some unseen stress.

Something protruded from its chest where the moment before there had been only raw muscle and awful sinew. He looked down, surprised at whatever it was, and squeezed Claire’s throat like a vice one final time before he coughed, and fell.

Her feet hit the ground the second after the corpse thumped down, and then she saw them – those glassy, soulless, unblinking black eyes. The giant twitched as the black-clad, faceless being stepped over him.

With some odd device, he bent and ran it up Claire’s body, then down. He looked at whatever was displayed on the screen and nodded. All this played out in a kind of twitchy slow-motion, like how the time between hitting a rock with your bike tire, and hitting the road with an arm plays out.

“Eighty-Three?” she asked, for lack of anything else to ask. “What the hell... how did you... what... just happened?”

His voice clicked before he spoke. “Time for that later. Right now you need safety.”

She blinked, her eyes hardly focusing. A strange smell enveloped Claire’s senses, and suddenly she felt light, in a way she hadn’t since undergraduate parties. It was like her body was floating in a sea of helium, and she felt like the voice, just pitching up and down, all around.

“What the hell is going on?” she said – or thought she said. Really all that came out was something like “murmf gortle,” but her unlikely hero seemed to get the point. “A nerve agent,” he said simply. “It will numb your pain but will not confuse you. We have it in case of injury.”

She felt herself begin to descend, but stuck out a hand, grasping the face of the creature who had her in his arms. “No,” she croaked, “can’t leave... can’t leave Fury behind, he...”

“Lives?” the static asked. “After such an encounter? If so, he is much stronger than I thought. He was infested with a parasite which led the monstrosity to him. He was likely replaced only seconds before the purple creature showed itself.”

Something about his detached, completely reasonable, obnoxiously even voice made Claire laugh. Or maybe that was the gas. Either way, she started chuckling. He cocked his head. “Funny?”

She couldn’t stop herself. It had to be the gas.

“It’s just,” she kind of chortle-choked, then snorted some. Real glorious. “You’re so even and sound like nothing’s going on, when you just killed that monster and Fury is laid out, and...”

Her vision went all wiggly again.

It must be the gas.

“I cannot speak any other way,” his voice was static still, but had a slight inflection. It was over-pronounced to an almost comical degree. It was like he had listened to someone else talk about how to speak like a real-life person. That of course, just made the whole thing even more ridiculous, which of course got her laughing even harder.