Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (12 page)

“What’s that?”

“The revenge I can see you burn to have? I won’t rest until you have that, either.”

––––––––

“I
s that them?” Jill craned her neck to try and see through the densely canopied forest, to no avail. “Or a squirrel? I can’t even tell out here. And in midnight darkness?” In the intervening hours, the pair had swapped out the Cessna for a helicopter suitable for two pilots and five passengers. Jacques, turned out, had connections
everywhere
.

With her face pressed against the glass on her door, she could hardly make anything out down below. She stood next, to see if she could do any better to look out the huge swinging door in the passenger area.

“Sit down, Miss Jilly, let me take care of finding the bears. We got heat sensors, you know, we got movement sensors, and if all else fails, which it might, we also got them getting to the extraction point on their own, a little bit behind schedule.” Behind the ancient, gold-rimmed aviators that were from some point in the early 90s Jill could see the vague twinkle of those ghostly-blue eyes. One corner of his mouth turned up in a grin.

“Ain’t the first time Rogue’s been late,” he added after a moment of silence, when he felt her tension begin to mount again.

Jill let out a puff of laughter. “No it most certainly is not,” she said with a smile. “Not at all. But it isn’t like him to do anything that would worry me. And this is certainly worrying me.”

Something in the pit of her stomach gnawed at her insides – but it wasn’t just nerves or anxiety. It felt like something
real
was eating her up from the inside out. “Hey Jacques?”

“
Mon ami
?” he broke out his smooth, swamp-borne patois.

“Something’s,” she trailed off, laying her hand on her gurgling stomach. “You ever get motion sick up here? All the lurching and the swinging and swaying?”

“I got some diazepam, but I’d not use that unless you were gettin’ the shakes. If you’re getting to where you feel all dizzy, put your head between your knees and hug ‘em.”

She tried it, and like he said, the sensation of the world spinning out of control stopped for a moment. “That’s so strange,” she said as she slowly lifted off her knees. “After all these years, why the hell would I
just now
start to get motion sick? I never even had a problem with those janky old rides at Disney World. You know, the ones with the chairs that jolt you all the hell over the place while you stare at a huge movie screen?”

Jacques sighed unhappily, and patted his own stomach. “
Ce qui est celui-la?
”

Jill stared at him for a second. “Too much French. I got ‘what is’ but after that Mrs. Grubble’s junior year French has exited my brain.”

“Too many bears to keep straight, I’m guessin’,” Jacques smiled. “Means ‘what is that one?’ I’m trying to think of the ride. Awful, horrible damn ol’ thing, the one where you’re in somebody’s, er, body, and—”

“Body Wars!” Jill shouted. “We must’a gone to the Mouse around the same time.”

With a mysterious look on his face, the pilot’s eyebrows lifted. “What if we was in the same room, rumblin’ around, everyone under the age of thirty screaming and lovin’ every second and—”

“Everyone over trying to keep themselves from heaving their Mickey-shaped ice cream treats?”

Jacques shook his head, smiling fondly. “Them were the days,
mon ami
, good days. Good days full of... okay, can I admit something to you? Somethin’ deep and personal?”

“This isn’t going to be one of those weird
Taxicab Confessions
kind of admissions is it?” Jill took on a deep voice and feigned a drunk slur. “One time, I tell you what I did. You wanna know? One time I found a hobo in the alley behind my house and paid him to do it with me.”

She was fairly proud of her imitation of a wildly drunk New Yorker on the old HBO series.

“Nothing so fun as that,” Jacques said. “No,
I
was the one yurking my little kid guts on them rides.” Somehow, his pleasant accent made his use of the world ‘yurk’ even sound a little sexy. “It’s why I became a pilot in the first place, to get over my fear of heights.”

“Is that them?” Jill arched her neck again to look at one of the ten screens above her head. “You became a pilot to get over heights? Seems extreme.”

He turned hard on the yoke, bringing the huge chopper in a slow, patient circle to see if, in fact, the five blips on the heat sensor were their quarry. “Well, that was one of the reasons. Money ain’t none too bad, either,” he said with a glitter in his eye.

“I’m glad you did,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be covered in... what’d you call it? Yurk? That’s them, isn’t it?”

“Thinkin’ it must be, unless there’s some other group of four giants with enough body heat to make them look like white splotches, and one littler one that seems to be either sleeping or unconscious.”

“Same thing, right?” Even as she spoke, a little surge crept through Jill. She shuddered silently thinking about their raw, animalistic heat that warmed her every night.

“Just depends on how it is you got there, I s’pose. Hold onto somethin’, we’re going down.”

She didn’t know how he did it. Flying the Cessna was one thing, but the way Jacques managed to weave the twenty foot chopper they picked up to fetch all the bears between pine spires, between massive oaks and firs, and somehow not hit anything at all blew her mind. She made a mental note to ask him how he was able to navigate those spaces at some point, although she wasn’t sure she’d like the answer, given how much experimentation and weird, comic book stuff she’d found out was reality.

“Nobody seems to mind that Captain America was made by drugging the shit out of someone,” she mumbled.

Jacques, apparently, heard because he cracked a smile, though he said nothing in response.

Claire strapped on a pair of heavy, awkward, black goggles that hummed and whirred for a second before flooding her vision with green light that let her see. Sometimes she hated being the one normal human in a field of superheroes. Other times, like when she got to play with stuff like this? She didn’t mind so much.

“It’s them, right?” she whispered back to the pilot, who had stuck his head out the same side as hers. “We’re not walking into a trap? We may or may not have had this experience once before.”

She heard the click of a revolver’s cylinder rotate twice and then set into place, ready to fire. Then, she felt the rubber grip press into her palm, which she accepted. The warmth of the rubber, the heft of the metal, even though she wasn’t sure why she had a gun, it did make her feel a little more secure.

“Indiana Jones never travelled without insurance. Didn’t someone say that to me?” Jacques said with a grin, recalling what Jill said when she appeared with an enormous pistol the first time she met Rogue and King – it seemed like an eternity before, even though it was actually only six months, going on seven.

Suddenly, just as she was laughing and checking the pistol for its safety, the telltale sign of a beeping radio made Jill spin her head. “Hey, Miss Jilly?” Jacques called. “We got some company.”

“How?” she asked. “There were only the five of them. And anyway, I can’t see anything. Not out—”

A whoosh of air, blasting past Jill’s pants leg, interrupted her. She spun, catching only a glimpse of something puffy, something furry, something...

“
Lupines
,” she hissed, recalling the name that Rogue and King had used to describe the feral, savage werewolves that lived in their forests. “But they’re not on the radar?”

“Nothin’ is!” Jacques shouted. “Whole thing just went black!”

But then she heard a crunch, and another shout – this the mixture of pain and surprise that only happens when a person hits the ground and gets the wind knocked out of them unexpectedly. Just like a quarterback who didn’t see a linebacker coming straight at him from behind, Jacques grunted and writhed and moaned afterwards, hissing out pain between clenched teeth.

“Som’bitch!” he snarled, the swamp accent becoming bitter, angry. “Where are those damn bears?”

Swooping her head from side to side, Jill could hear nothing, could see nothing. That’s when she remembered the strange thing about lupines, and took her goggles off, laying them gently on the floor of the chopper as she stepped down, her boots crunching into the leaves. Silently, she opened the catch on the revolver and lifted the cylinder to her nose, drawing a whiff.

Steel, iron filings, gunpowder
, the scents filled her nose.
And silver
. She smiled, clicking the cylinder back into place. “You’re good at insurance policies, Jacques.”

He laughed, but was still in pain. “I can’t tell how many there are,” he said as she drew to his side and lifted the thin, old pilot to his feet. “Two hit me though.”

“You bleeding?”

He shook his head, which she could only see because of the cabin lights in the chopper, streaming through the windows. The slow whop-whop-whop of the idling blades deadened most of the sounds around them. “Can we turn it off? Be easier to hear.”

“No way, no how,” he said, barely loud enough to be audible. “We need to get our bears and get the fuck outta ‘dis place. We ain’t here for huntin’, Miss Jilly.”

She nodded. “You said you lost them though?”

“No, I said the radar went dead. Something’s blotting it out. They’re close though, and I’m sure they heard the chopper. Can’t be more than a half mile away, maybe closer. Hard to tell though.”

Another whoosh of air.
They’re close
, Jill thought. A grim look crossed her face, but she squeezed her gun, feeling ever so slightly better.

The next one didn’t miss.

With the force of a medicine ball crashing straight into her sternum, Jill let out a breathless grunt, Jacques a shout of surprise. Her vision was flickering, black and gold and white and prickly, as the air in her lungs burned.

Jill opened her eyes just in time to see a pair of ghastly yellow ones staring at her, and a second later, she saw the monster’s teeth.

Instinct took over. She swung an elbow upward, into the side of the creature’s head. It yelped, she gained her feet and immediately fired.

A jet of spark blinded her momentarily, a spurt of flame burst from the end of the .38, and a second later the wolf’s hissing stopped, and the wound’s hissing continued as the body singed and fizzled. The familiar smell of burning fur, burning wolf, met her nose, but not before she heard Jacques fire, and then scream, “Suck silver, you son of a bitch!”

“Good one,” she said. “Rambo would be proud.”

Jacques chuckled under his breath. “I could really use a bunch of bears right about now. I’m a little tired of fighting these days..”

“Don’t see we have much choice.”

“Never do, when it comes to it,” Jacques added sagely, before the next round of action exploded all around the pair.

The forest came to life, all at once. From the east and west, teeth and claws and fangs descended with such ferocity and terrible fury that they managed to attack
each other
before they got to Jill and her pilot. The wolves tore into one another, yelping, screeching, and crying out in the night. Jill fired again, claiming another lupine, and Jacques blasted two of them, but there were
so
many that if they ever managed to get themselves organized, there would be absolutely no hope of escape.

“
Help...
”

The cry came to both Jacques and Jill and the same time. It was distant, weak.

“Help...
”

“Tell me you heard that,” Jill snarled, kicking a hissing wolf just to make sure he was dead. “Please tell me you heard that.”

“Loud and clear. Well, not loud, but clear.” Jacques put his foot on a lupine and pulled his knife free with a sizzle. The corpse let out a popping sound as soon as the blade was free. “You think it was our girl?”

“But why would the bears leave her alone? Makes no sense.”

Both of them were breathing heavy, both covered in a thin film of sweat, despite the chill in the air. Neither wanted to face the reality that perhaps something had happened to the bears, something had captured, hurt, or...

“This way,” Jill called. “She’s over here. I think.”

For the moment, the wolves had stopped howling, they’d stopped swarming. For the moment there was peace. She knew that when a few of their numbers were culled, Lupines normally calmed for a time. There was something different about these though. She remembered that they hadn’t howled, they
hadn’t
swarmed. Something seemed to have driven them wild again. Like one of those strange, fungal parasites that makes ants climb up into the tops of a tree before a spire bursts out of their skull.

“
Help... me...
”

The voice was getting weaker. It was a woman’s voice, high pitched though exhausted and apparently in some kind of pain or terror.
Probably both
. Something about the voice ticked a box in the back of Jill’s head that wasn’t entirely alien.

She sounds like I did about six months ago
.

“Jacques?” she called out. “You stay here, keep this thing going. Got it?”

“What? No! You’re fuckin’ nuts!”

The two of them were shouting over the helicopter blades. Jill dug in her feet, and the pilot was well aware of the uselessness of trying to argue with her when she dug in her feet and made up her mind.

“I’m telling you,” Jill hissed, trying to calm him down. “I know what’s happening. I’ve been here before, been through this not too long ago. Something’s happening with the bears, and there’s a terrified girl out there who probably got dropped on the ground because GlasCorp doesn’t want her. I know it sounds crazy, but—”

Jacques, despite the darkness, put his aviators back on, and smiled. “Don’t sound crazy to me,
mon ami
, sounds like you know what you’re doing. I’ll keep trying to jigger this radar, keep trying to fiddle the heat sensor until it’s back online. But you stay safe, and bring that girl back. And Jill?”