Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance) (16 page)

Suddenly, it all made sense. Rogue nodded. “My clan,” he said. “Taken by you. You took them from me, you ripped the heart out of my chest.”

The man’s soft face relaxed into a Vaseline-smeared smirk. Everything about him was fuzzy, slightly out of focus, from the watery eyes to the shimmer of saliva-slick on his lips.

“That’s as close to death as I’ve come,” Rogue said. There was only a tiny shake in his voice that he managed to hide well enough with a forceful swallow. “You?”

That greasy smile broadened. “I’ve seen... enough. Take a sample when he’s back in the,” he paused for another round of closed-mouth coughing. “Back in the cell.”

Gasmask grasped the bear’s shoulder, squeezing hard and turning him.

“Oh, Eighty-Three?”

Gasmask froze and turned. “Sir?”

“When you’re finished, send Ninety-Four up here. My cover is beginning to stick to my neck.”

The not-robot offered a curt nod, and then turned again, shoving Rogue through the door, which slammed shut behind him. Rogue turned to Gasmask. “Eighty-Three? You’re a number?”

“It’s always bothered me a little. Doesn’t seem to bother the others.”

“That doesn’t really answer anything,” Rogue said, feeling suddenly heavy and fatigued. “What
are
you? Who was he?”

“I told you once,” Gasmask said, with a strange amount of joviality, considering. He was more verbose than he had been. Perhaps he was starting to relax? If he was, Rogue thought, that’d be at least one thing he had going for him. “It’s a good question.”

“What is?”

“What I am. What we are.”

Rogue sensed a shrug, though it was too smooth to be sure. “How can you not know what you are? Don’t you have a memory? Parents?”

“He is the parent. Was? Time’s strange when you can’t die.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The soulless, black, goggle-clad face turned toward Rogue. “We’ve arrived. Talking with prisoners is forbidden. Or at least, I think it is. None of the others have much of an interest in talking with anyone about anything, so I’m not entirely sure a rule was ever established.”

They had somehow already arrived back at the holding cell where Rogue was supposed to be “sampled” whatever that meant. King had sat up, but had apparently either gone to sleep or passed out again. Down the way was another scream.

“What’s all that screaming?” Rogue asked, stepping back into place to be shackled again. Eighty-Three didn’t bother with the restraints.

“Those other two you were with. They’ve been drugged to keep them from breaking things. They were a great deal more angry than were you two.”

That time, the passivity in Gasmask’s voice was almost comical, even though the answer made Rogue’s blood boil.

A flash of insight struck the big bear. Maybe he could activate this thing’s emotion sensors or whatever it had. “You know what they’re doing to them, right? They’re experimenting on them. They’re experimenting on us. That blood sample you’re about to—OW!”

That clicking noise, the one Rogue thought might be laughter, came again. “Sorry,” Eighty-three said. “Very busy.”

“Are you an ant?”

Gasmask tilted his head to the side. “Explain?”

“An ant. You know, little creature, builds a nest in the dirt? One leader, a bunch of drones that wander around in some kind of hive-mind thing?” His thoughts turned back to one of his many Star Trek binges. It struck him that he might have wandered into a Borg ship, if he didn’t know any better.

“Hum. Similar, I think. Eckert needs the sample. Stay quiet and I won’t have to have you tranquilized like the others.”

And with that, he was gone.

Eckert
, Rogue thought, clenching his jaws and his fists at the same time.
I thought he was dead
.

Suddenly, the scarf, the whistling, the weird questions about death, they all made a little more sense.

––––––––

T
hey touched down at half past three, which was about an hour after the mystery wound appeared in Jacques’s shoulder. Dawn was nothing more than an imaginary gray streak on the horizon as the helicopter settled with a heavy groan of metal. Until the second they landed, Claire could not in any way understand how she kept her shit together.

All the blood, the panic, the terror, and embarrassingly, worst of all, the horrible sinking feeling that leaving her bears behind inflicted, haunted her. But, she managed to choke it back, to keep the bile in her throat instead of her mouth.

But once they wheeled the Cajun off and took him off to do something or other, it all caught up at once. She started shaking, her eyes went hazy, and the entire inside of her mouth turned to cotton.

“You have to calm the hell down,” Jill hissed, pulling Claire aside and into the vending machine room on floor six. “I know you’re scared, I understand it. I’ve been in a pretty similar place. But if you keep acting like this, you’re going to kill yourself with a heart attack.”

The only other company in the room was a frumpy man in an untucked flannel shirt who seemed so absorbed in the newspaper he was glaring at that neither of them even considered his presence. Whatever was on page 2-B must have been
really
amazing.

Claire chewed hard on her bottom lip, which was tucked neatly behind her small, square, straight teeth. From the look on her face, she wasn’t paying a lick of attention to anything Jill was telling her. “Do you have a dollar?”

“Huh? Oh you’re probably starving, aren’t you? Here.”

The dollar slid into the machine with a slow whirring sound.

“Need another one. If they don’t screw you with the doctor bill, they’ll gouge you to death paying for a Snickers bar.”

Jill clunked a pair of quarters into the machine. “Is it at least king size? Well either way, we’re splitting this thing.”

The two of them sat in silence, their absurd meal of Diet Coke and half of a regular sized Snickers bar laying on napkins that fluttered in the stale air circulating through the room courtesy of an overhead fan with ball bearings that desperately needed to be replaced.

Claire mashed down the first half inch of her share of the candy bar with the first two fingers on her left hand. She scooped the wounded food along the napkin and then scraped it off with her bottom teeth. “I never thought I’d say this, but this is the first time a Snickers hasn’t done a damn thing for me.”

She stared very intently at the mooshed-up nougat and caramel on her fingertips, and snipped another peanut off with her teeth. “How did you deal with it?”

Jill had already finished her candy bar, and had sucked down about half her Coke. “Which part?”

Claire pursed her lips and arched an eyebrow, tilting her head slightly toward the stranger behind them who had actually moved for the first time, but was then just as absorbed in page 3-A as he was 2-B a few minutes before.

“Oh, calm down,” Jill said. “Jacques was right. No one’s going to bother looking for you. Just don’t worry about it.”

The phone, which had miraculously been in low-power mode for almost a week at that point, buzzed from the table where they’d left it to charge before beginning their feast. Sighing, Claire got to her feet and poked at the phone.

“Oh holy shit, how did I forget?”

It was Jill’s turn to quirk an eyebrow.

“This guy, Nick, a waiter from this bar I go to, I was supposed to go out with him on Monday. Christ, I feel awful. I gotta call him back.”

Thinking quick, Jill hopped up, snatched the phone out of Claire’s hand and threw it violently to the floor. The tiny electronic guts spilled all over the floor with a glorious crashing sound at exactly the same second that Claire’s eyes took on a fury that looked vaguely like a bear about to pounce. “The
fuck
was that?” she hissed. “What are you doing?”

Red fury pulsed in her temples.
I don’t know this woman. I don’t know any of them. Why am I here? Why am I listening to all this shit? They’re gonna get me. They’re all out to hunt me down.

Her head pounded. The palms of her hands went all clammy and cold when she clenched her fists.

“Claire?” Jill asked, reaching out to put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, but recoiled when Claire actually
hissed
at her.

As she looked at her, Jill saw Claire’s eyes began to vibrate.

Vibrate
.

“This isn’t right,” she said, reaching out again. This time, Claire kept hissing, but Jill didn’t pull away, instead grabbing her shoulder and squeezing to try and ground her. “Are you in there?”

The man with the newspaper folded it down, but looked on dispassionately, as though he was completely uninterested in the woman holding the shoulder of the other woman, who was frothing at the mouth. Something in his look was calculating, but he was just frozen.

“Who
are
you?” Claire shrieked, trying to pull herself from Jill’s grip. “Why are you doing this to me? Who
are
you?”

“I’m Jill Appleton, and we met last night. You’re okay, we’re both fine, we’re here with our friend who got hurt.”

Her voice was so calm, so patient, that even in her blind rage, it quelled a little of the fury in Claire’s eyes. The younger, shorter woman blinked a few times, shook her head, and immediately sat down, hard.

“What... what happened?”

“You’ve been mind-controlled. Hold still.”

The man with the untucked flannel shirt tossed his paper aside, strode forward and forced Claire’s head backward so that he could stare... up her nose?

“Were you alone?” he asked. When she didn’t respond, he repeated the question slowly, calmly, but firmly. “At any point since you got here, have you been alone?”

Claire shook her head. Jill’s eyes widened. “Draven?”

“Shaving a mustache is a hell of a thing, especially when you had a split palate as a kid. Makes you feel all self-conscious.”

With that, Claire’s eyes rolled back in her head. Jill rushed forward to catch her, and did, just in time. Like a fly falling down a drip of molasses, Claire slumped to the side, and slid, ass-first, off the chair and to the floor.

“How did you,” Jill started and then shook her head. “Never mind. I’ve stopped bothering with applying normal physics to you.”

“Clever girl,” Draven said, his mustache-free lip, curling in a scarred smile. “You ever seen
Jurassic Park
? Great movie. Just caught it last weekend.”

“Yeah, I have, about twenty years ago when the rest of the world did.” Jill’s shock at seeing her old friend was slightly tempered by the fact that he’d fooled her, and also that she’d been ready to babble on about the bears and everything in front of a stranger. “But dinosaur movies aside, what the hell happened to her. Are you serious about mind control?”

“Hold her head,” Draven said. “This is going to look a lot more painful than it actually is. Although it’s good she’s as conscious as Elvis.”

As she tried to calculate exactly what that joke meant, Jill watched the old man insert what seemed to be a pair of six inch long tweezers into Claire’s nose. He rooted around, moving the tongs underneath her skin, and grunted with irritation.

“It’s gotta be here somewhere. I’d know that behavior anywhere.” He kept fiddling. “Seen it a thousand times. Anyway, she’s the one who escaped from GlasCorp. There’s no telling when they put it in her head.”

He stuck his tongue out, gnawing on it as a concentration aid. “Hold her tighter. Even knocked out, this might give her a start. So was she ever out of your eyeshot?”

Jill shook her head. “I went to the bathroom a couple times, but no, we pretty much landed, took Jacques to the desk, and they whisked him off for surgery. Any time she was alone, she was just in a waiting room.”

Draven grunted and bit down harder. “There,” he said. “I think I got it. I’m betting this thing’s been in here awhile for how tight it is.”

“How long
what
has been—holy
shit
.”

With a look of pride, the old bear extracted a small, cylindrical object, from Claire’s nose. It was shaped a bit like a spark plug, but instead of a firing coil inside the glass cylinder, there was a slim, intricate microchip.

Draven looked at Jill and gave her a wink. “Well, you know. Old men know things too. How you been?”

The casual nature of his voice took her a little by surprise. “Uh, good? Rogue and King being captured or lost or whatever happened to them notwithstanding, I guess. How did you get here? How did you find us?”

The little cylinder clicked, beeped in a pitch so high that Jill thought maybe she’d imagined it, and then it popped. She jumped slightly as the cylinder vanished into absolute nothingness.

“Kidnapped, huh?” Draven asked. “I’m guessing GlasCorp took them back?”

Jill shook her head. “No clue. Jacques and I dropped them off to grab those three,” she tilted her head toward the unconscious woman. “And there was some kind of fight. Lupines, of which I killed three, and then... yeah, they were just gone. She said she woke up alone in the woods, but had seen Rogue and King before that. So something happened to them in the chunk of time they were out in the woods and I was in a helicopter. And you never answered me – how did you get in here?”

Draven narrowed his gaze. “Let me tell you something. I escaped from these jokers over twenty years ago, yeah?”

Jill nodded.

“They don’t change their game
that
much. All it takes is a coat, a fake ID badge and a convincing limp. But that doesn’t matter right now. We have to get out of here. Where’s Jacques?”

“Hurt,” Jill said. “He had some kind of wound that kept getting bigger, I—”

“How did he get it?” Draven was already collecting Claire’s things, already pushing Jill toward the door.

She shook her head. “There was a noise, a buffet of wind hit the chopper while we were looking for Rogue and King, and then he just kinda screeched and keeled over with a hole in his shoulder.

The look on Draven’s face was hard set. The lines on either side of his mouth firm with purpose. He nodded gravely. “We really, really need to get out of here.”