Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Broken Pine Bears Book 1) (20 page)

Or, maybe, she just
really
wanted to kill this thing, save those cubs, and get back to California where she belonged, with the bears she belonged there
with
.

To her surprise, the big beast pitched around a little slower after a moment, whipping his arms around, slapping at himself trying to dislodge her. King and Rogue watched as their former clan-mate helplessly waved his arms like a tyrannosaurus trying to get rid of a hamster biting his neck.

The two of them exchanged a glance for a split second, which Jill only caught because she lifted her head to bite somewhere else. The taste was awful, the stench of the monster wretched and foul and sour in her nose, but the thought that maybe what she was doing was actually helping? That went a long way to keep Jill from letting go.

From out of nowhere, two locomotives blasted straight into Madix’s chest, and even though he didn’t fall, Rogue and King were apparently well enough to do it again. The second blow had him teetering, and on the third, the monster howled, he shrieked, and Jill let go with just enough time to get out from under his falling body before he smashed her into the ground.

“Now!” she heard Draven shout. “You got a gun, use it!”

Jill stared in disbelief for a moment at what they’d just done. She heard Draven shouting, but her head was a jumble of panic and adrenaline. She was so dizzy, so disoriented from the wild airplane spinning she’d just done, that it was all she could do to stand.

She took one halting step, then another. Just when she thought she’d managed to catch her balance, it turned out that last step? One too close.

Madix’s insane, bloodshot, yellowed-out eyes flared open right before he sat up and planted a fist right in the center of Jill’s chest.

The air rushed out of her in a torrent, and came back with a wheeze that felt black at first, and then like fire burning inside her. She didn’t know what she hit, or even if she’d hit anything, but whatever happened, she was
not
okay.

She felt herself sucking a breath that seemed like it never came. She fought, tugging the air into her lungs, blowing it all out and then trying again.

Rushing into her, bringing every nerve to life, the air she sucked in came with a slight aroma of coppery blood, and the dirt in which she was laying. Jill heard noises behind her, tried to make sense of them, but honestly in the pain she was in? Breathing was enough of a trick, forget about advanced rational thought.

She heard Rogue call out – or maybe it was a cry of pain. She didn’t know, couldn’t tell. But then King made a noise, and someone else – Draven? Must’ve been.

A roar that chilled her to the core came next. The force of the sound was like drinking a pot of
real
strong coffee after drinking eight beers too many. She sucked a breath, in surprise. Pain shot through every nerve in her body. Jill turned to see the mutant beast pick up the old man at his feet and hurl him, effortlessly, into the side of the chopper.

The old bear hit with a thud, so hard that the huge metal bird waivered in the sky.

“No!” Jill cried out, pushing herself backward, blinded by pain but unwilling to give up.

She kept on moving backwards. She heard a footstep, then another.

Madix
, she realized as a shock of cold shot through her.
He’s
...

She scrabbled at the ground, trying to get a handhold, trying to get up.

Rogue called her name, King screamed for her.

And then she wrapped her hand around a rubber grip. She felt cold steel rivets.

Her fingers closed instinctively around the pistol she’d forgotten was in the belt holster Jacques gave her. When she hit the tree, the holster must’ve come loose, but the gun stayed right where it was supposed to stay. She opened her eyes, but in the darkness, this far away from everything where she’d been thrown? It was hard to see her own hand, let alone anything else.

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.”

*

“T
his 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.

––––––––

J
ill 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 looped 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.