Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (6 page)

“Checked how?”

“You ever heard of the internet?” Draven smiled as he pinched his Velcro pockets closed. “Turns out, you can find a whole lot of stuff there. But no, to not be an asshole for a second, it all checks out. Three people escaped, one corpse left behind, and one security guard knocked unconscious but not really hurt.”

“What killed the dead guy?”

“Well, he was a scientist. A guy named Jim Eckert. It’s a name you probably wouldn’t recognize, but it’s familiar to me. Very familiar. He led one of the experimentation teams that...”

“Elsa?” Rogue asked, the name of his former mate, who had died at the hands of these so-called scientists, these barbaric monsters.

Draven’s mouth hardened into a taut line. He nodded. “Tooth marks,” he said somberly. “Very
big
tooth marks. Tore out his throat and half of his shoulder.”

Rogue nodded along. “Good,” he said. “Sounds like he got what he deserved. You’ll let me know if anything else comes up?”

“You’ll be the first to know. Give my best to everyone.”

Without another word, Draven stepped up onto the overpass, and simply dropped straight off of it. When Rogue rushed to the rail and looked over, the old man was just gone.

“You old son of a bitch,” Rogue swore, with a smile. “Well. See you around, I guess.”

On the horizon, as the big bear began to descend the side of the overpass, back to where he’d stashed his bike, thunder boomed in the distance. He stood for a moment, watching an arc of lightning crack the sky, and then another peal of thunder blasted the desert landscape.

It was like a dream, Rogue thought; an endless, meaningless, haunting dream. One of those nightmares where you go to sleep and live an entire life in your mind in the eight hours of sleep you get, in eight-second bursts. And by the end of the dream, you
actually
feel old, tired, ready to die from extreme antiquity.

Rain pattered the cracked ground a hundred feet to the north of where Rogue stood, but somehow his position stayed dry. These pop-up storms that did nothing but smell nice and cool the air momentarily happen all the time, but for some reason, this one stuck in the bear’s mind. He watched the clouds boil up on the horizon, watched the lightning arc again – blue and yellow and green to his over-sensitive eyes.

“What happens when this is all over?” he asked the night. “What does it mean that someone escaped? Does it mean anything, or am I just seeing things where they don’t exist?”

He pulled the soft leather of his jacket closer around his neck, shielding himself from the wind that began to bluster across the hard-cracked desert. He laughed at himself, then laughed at himself laughing
at himself.

The phone in his back pocket rang again.

Rogue slipped it from his jeans and opened it, pressing the handset against his face without speaking.

“You there?” it was Jill, and she wasn’t happy. “Rogue? Answer me. I need you back here.”

“Sorry,” he finally croaked, still reflecting on everything that had come up in the last eight minutes of his life. Elsa, the clan, the escape. But something stopped him from saying anything. Something made him just act like he’d had yet another pointless, boring meeting with the old man that saved all their skins. “Draven was just... just checking in. What’s wrong?”

“King,” she said plainly. “Slate and Arrow went out drinking with their friends. King is convinced they’re going to end up on someone’s mantle. Just hurry up, okay?”

He nodded, even though he knew no one could see him. “I’m on the way. I’ll try to cut some time on the way back. It’s raining a little. It’ll be easy to blast across big chunks of desert.”

She usually told him to be careful when he suggested something like that. Although recently, she’d started relaxing more, figuring that he wasn’t actually going to hurt himself, since even if he did, he’d heal shortly afterward.

“Well okay,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to bed. If you show up before I wake up tomorrow, I’m sure he’ll still be pacing. Just... do me a favor, okay?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Anything for you.”

“I’m not feeling so great. Something’s giving me indigestion. Anyway, calm him down, get him to get some sleep. And Rogue?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t slam the door.”

With a laugh, he clicked the phone shut, swinging his leg back over the saddle of his motorcycle and kicking the engine to life.

––––––––

“W
here the hell have you
been
?”

Jill pushed the slightly-sweaty tendrils of hair out of her head, and swallowed hard. Rogue looked at her for a moment, thinking that she really
didn’t
look all that great. Not in a non-attractive way, rather in a super-tired and not-sleeping-well kind of way. On top of all that, King had been up all night worrying about his cubs, which didn’t help a damn thing in the world.

She threw the words at Rogue like a brick to the forehead, thrown from a car which was going fairly slowly, but fast enough to get away before he could chase it. He put his hands up defensively, instinctually, and shook his head. “Hold on just a second, Jill, you know where I went, I went—”

She blew out a puff of air that sent one of her curls of hair flying backward before it flopped back down in front of her face. “Yes,” she said. “I know where you were. How is he, by the way?”

“Draven? Fine. Mysterious, I guess.”

“So he’s still Draven. Good, glad we got that out of the way. Now, will you do something about
him
?”

Jill flicked her hand backward, thumb outstretched in the direction of an excessively large, and apparently excessively mopey, werebear.

“What’s wrong with King?” Rogue asked, looking perplexed. “Is he really this upset over Arrow and Slate? But they’re—”

“Yeah,” Jill said, firmly entrenching her hands into the tops of her hipbones. “Yeah, they’re both twenty-one, and went out with their friends. God knows what he’s so worked up about, but he’s been pacing back and forth since they left. If he had any pearls, he’d be clutching them.”

Rogue cocked his head to the side.

Still not quite up to snuff on idioms, I guess.
“Like a housewife from the 50s. Donna Reed? June Cleaver? I know you’ve seen those shows because I sat in a hotel room with you two while you drank half the liquor in Santa Barbara, laughing at
Leave it to Beaver
re-runs.”

When they’d beat their hasty escape, Rogue, King, Jill, and all twenty-three of the remaining Broken Pine cubs – all boys – were lucky enough to be put up in a hotel owned by someone Jill once went on a very bad date with. But it turned out, he was a pretty all right guy after all. He wasn’t even mad about the messes they left, since Jill agreed to another date with him.

Poor guy.

He’d just about shit his pants when he walked in on a half-shifted bear-cub trying to get out of a locked bathroom, but he was oddly easy to convince that he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw. It all worked out. It always does.

“But why pearls?”

Jill sighed heavily, trying hard not to laugh, because laughing would really degrade how serious she was acting. “They wore pearl necklaces.”

Rogue started giggling – or as close to giggling as massive bear can get. “Pearl... necklace? Like...?”

“Oh right, of course he understands
that
. Shut up and go calm King down, will you? I can’t handle this idiot. I went to bed with him pacing, woke up to him pacing.”

Suddenly, the look on Rogue’s face got a bit stormier, more worried. “They were gone all night?”

“I guess?” she shrugged. “They went out, they never called. They live half a block away.”

Speaking of things working out, when it came time to get out of the hotel, it just so happened that Jill’s friend had a line on a handful of row houses that backed up to a little pond. It wasn’t cheap, but it was doable. Then again, they hadn’t actually finished buying them yet. The closing date for the mortgage was in a week and a half, and Jill wasn’t entirely sure what to do about a couple of bears who were citizens of the United States in only the strictest sense, one of whom had taken almost a month to leave behind his penchant for loincloths.

Rogue nodded, but his eyes were still dark. “This could mean trouble,” he growled. “They wouldn’t stay out all night. Not unless—”

“They... got drunk and passed out on someone’s couch? They’re the same age as people graduating from college. And, being honest with you – which probably will say a lot about our colleges – they’re probably more responsible than most of those.”

Rogue grunted a laugh.

“I just don’t understand!” King threw his hands up in the air. “How could they have been kidnapped like this? How did we let them out of our sight?”

“That’s quite a step,” Rogue side-mouthed, to Jill. “King,” he called out, “they’re cubs. Both of us did things just as irresponsible when we were... Okay, probably you didn’t. I certainly did, though.”

“And that’s supposed to calm my storming nerves? My roiling stomach?”

Rogue let out a sigh and placed his hand on his sworn brother’s shoulder. “Listen,” he said, consciously calm. “There’s almost no chance they’ve been kidnapped. No one knows where we went, no one has been watching us, and no one has followed any of us anywhere.”

Jill sauntered into the room, nursing a cup of coffee she’d plucked off the countertop. “GlasCorp headquarters is halfway across the country.”

The word stung her throat. GlasCorp – the shadowy, mysterious organization that on the surface was a simple pharmaceutical company – turned out to be in an even darker business. They’d been the ones to kidnap the Broken Pine clan, and done horrific experiments on them, leaving Rogue and King alone with the cubs. Understandably, the two bear alphas were both rather... cautious, to put it lightly, about the possibility of their having been found.

“Draven is safe, brother,” Rogue said flatly. “If anyone was being hunted, it’d be him. And he makes no secret of himself, at least, not so far as I could tell. He seemed unconcerned. Perhaps we should calm down?”

King resumed pacing, shrugging Rogue’s hand off his shoulder. “You calm down,” he growled. “You be calm. I’ll be realistic.”

“He’s starting to sound like you,” Jill said to Rogue. “Can’t blame me for the fretting.”

Rogue narrowed his eyes and moved past her, once again grabbing King by the shoulder. “Why are you so worried? Explain that, at least.”

“Because!” the larger alpha shouted. “Because they’ve never left like this! They’ve never gone quiet and not called, not answered. Something is wrong, Rogue. No matter how badly you want to think it hasn’t, something has gone wrong. I feel it in my bones.”

“But where? Why? And even if you’re right, what can be done about it?”

“I don’t know,” King growled. “But until I hear something, I’m not going to
calm down
.”

He hissed the last two words, as though they burned his tongue to speak.

A sound outside turned Jill’s head, but the two bears were too caught up in their duel of grim looks to notice. “Uh, guys?” she prodded Rogue, because King was so tense she figured she’d sprain her finger if she tried.

“We
have
to find them,” King said.

“We
can’t
,” Rogue answered.

“Guys?”

“What?” they both said, turning to face her at the same time. Just as they did, two
other
faces appeared, flanking Jill.

“Where the hell have
you
been?” King almost roared. He rushed forward, grabbing both – very large – cubs with fistfuls of jacket in either of his hands. “Where the hell were you?”

In the next breath, he held them close, crushing the two of them against his body.

“Out?” Slate answered in a question. “It got later than we thought.”

“And now it’s earlier, uh, than we thought.” Arrow – Grant, whichever – spoke next.

Rogue took in the two disheveled, confused-looking, bleary-eyed cubs, and immediately broke into a smile, then a booming laugh that came straight from his belly. “Oh have I ever been there a time or two.”

––––––––

“H
ow long do we have to stay out here?” Claire asked, picking a burr out of her sock, and then deciding maybe it was time to wash the socks again, instead of just picking off the stickers. “I think I’m starting to wilt.”

“No flower as beautiful as you could wilt,” the very serious, very somber, and apparently, very studied in pick-up lines, bear named Stone said.

“You keep laying those on her,” the other one, with an easier way about him, said. He called himself Fury, but that wasn’t his original name, which he didn’t use, because he didn’t much like it. “She’s gonna turn you in for harassment.”

Stone was serious, grim, and more than a little hard to take because every single word he said had such intense gravity that it was slightly uncomfortable. Fury, on the other hand, seemed to
never
be serious, not even when the situation called for it. On their way out of GlasCorp, he’d been chattering away, rattling off one-liners that would have impressed Arnold Schwarzenegger. They’d arrived in the forest without much drama, following the mess with Eckert. The only other guard they’d come across was easily knocked out – at Claire’s insistence that no one else be killed after Eckert was maimed and that other guard hit the wall so hard he must’ve broken about thirty bones.

But, she knew that underneath his easy exterior, Fury was hiding something darker. He’d been the one that ended Eckert, and moved with such easy grace that she could tell it wasn’t the first time he’d killed.

“Officer,” Claire said, picking up her phone and pantomiming a call. “Yeah, I’d like to report sexual harassment. Yes, that’s right. Uh-huh, well actually it was a bear. Yeah, he’s about seven feet tall and—”

She recoiled and looked at the phone. “That asshole hung up on me. Guess it’s not quite a believable story, huh?”