Can't Bear To Run (Kendal Creek Bears, #1) (12 page)

“Oh come on, Fletch,” he said impatiently. “Just get it out. We still have to figure out what to do about Jack Creighton thinking he can go behind my back and take over the town because I have a human girlfriend.”

He hit the wall again, but this time it was more of an impotent love pat.

“Look at me, Dax,” she said.

Turning his huge head toward her, Dax did as he was told. “Yeah?”

“You, my friend, are in love.”

“What? No,” he said. “No way, that’s crazy. I just found her. I might have been
wanting
to for six years, but...”

Fletch pursed her lips.

“I can’t be in love with her, I can’t possibly be,” he trailed off. “In love? Oh my God, Fletch,” he said. “I’m in love with her.”

“You have been for a long time. And that, my friend,” she said with a smile, “is exactly what’s wrong with you.”

––––––––

I
hate driving in the rain. First of all, I’m kind of night blind, and I don’t have the best vision anyway, but damn do I hate driving in the rain.

Also, I hate driving in places I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, that’s a little hard to believe coming from a girl who packed all her stuff and went on a cross country road trip with no end planned, but there it is. And there I was, living a collective hell of everything I absolutely hated about driving – at night, in the rain, in a place I’d never been.

Oh, and there were apparently magical bears rambling around turning into giant naked muscle men.

On top of
all that
, I couldn’t get Dax out of my mind. How he said he wanted to protect me and keep me and hold me and all that, I couldn’t get those smooth, soft, loving words out of my head. And that’s what they had to be – loving. Nothing else can make a person say something like that to another person, but damned if I knew how to take it.

Lost in thought, I barely noticed the bear in the road before it was too late.

I wrenched the wheel left, swerving around the massive creature in front of me. It turned its head, watching with curious intent, as my Jeep turned a doughnut. I knew better than to try and right the wheels and just held tight to the wheel, letting the hunk of steel circle until it stopped.

“Shit,” I breathed. “That just happened.”

I looked over at the bear, his huge golden head turned in my direction. He cocked his head in a way that seemed to me that he was checking to make sure I was okay. “I’m fine,” I heard myself say. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I immediately chided myself for talking to a bear. “Don’t worry, you didn’t hurt me.”

As crazy as it sounds, I’m almost sure that bear nodded before he ran off.

I got my Jeep back on the road, back into the right lane, and took a few seconds to look around and collect my thoughts. I turned on my phone and flipped over to the GPS app. In something of a prophetic foreshadowing, the words
LOCATION NOT FOUND; CANNOT GIVE DIRECTIONS
flashed on the screen.

With a curse, I threw the thing into the back seat where it bounced off the half-upholstered bench seat and tumbled to the floor. “Great. Great fucking luck I have. Miles from civilization, no clue where I am, and the damn phone won’t even pick up a signal. How is it that everything seems to happen at once?”

An old truck, one of those rounded-off Fords from the 40s, had at some point during my extended thought monologue, pulled up behind me. Whoever it was laid on the horn.

Not thinking about how it was so dark there was no way they could possibly see, I looked into the mirror and mouthed that I was sorry. I took a breath and looked back again. The headlights had gone out of the truck, but I didn’t think anything of it. Instead, I just pushed the gas and started to slowly roll forward.

“Hey!” I heard from outside. “Hey you there!” came from both sides of my Jeep. “You aw-right?” the question came with a deep, heavily accented voice that gave me flashbacks from the one time I’d watched
Deliverance
.

Whoever it was knocked at my window. “Hey! You awright in thar?”

I turned to look, and found myself staring at possibly the dirtiest, ugliest mug I’d ever laid eyes on – and trust me, that’s saying something. I nodded and said I was fine, but kept the window up and pushed the gas pedal gently again, hoping to convince my friends to go on their way.

“You hear that, Pa?” one of the voices asked.

“Is this the one we’re lookin’ for, Loretta?”

Holy hell, that’s a GIRL?
I thought. A quick look confirmed my worst fears.
Yep, that’s a girl. I guess
.

“I dunno, pa,” she said. “What’s your name?”

I pushed on the gas a little more, but there wasn’t even the slightest hint that this odd looking group was going to let me go. I didn’t want to hurt anyone, even though in time I realized how stupid I was being by not just punching the gas and letting her rip.

The voice became more insistent. “What’s yer name?” it was joined by a banging at the window of my Jeep.

“She ain’t sayin, pa!” the girl shouted out.

“God awmighty, Lore, if she ain’t sayin’, she’s the one.”

“The one of what?” I asked. “I’m Raine Matthews and I’m trying to find my way back to the interstate. I don’t know where I took a wrong turn, but—“

“See?” the older voice asked. “All you gotta do is ask the right questions.”

“But Pa, you didn’t ask her nothing!”

“Shut up, will ya? Junior, get her. I’m tired out.”

“Get me?” I cried out. “What the hell are you—?”

Glass shattered. A cold wind, carrying plenty of rain, howled through the remnants of my passenger-side window, almost mirroring my own screech of panic. “Who the hell are you? What the hell is going on?”

“Put somethin’ over her mouth,” I heard. “She just won’t shut up, so make her!”

A bag went over my head, some kind of rough fabric that I couldn’t identify scratched my face. The lock on the passenger door popped open, and all I could think was
why didn’t they just open my door instead of breaking the window
?

Funny things go through your head when you’re in the middle of a panic attack.

Unfortunately for me, the panic was just starting.

*

I
’d never seen anything in my life to prepare me for what I was about to be right in the middle of. With a bag over my head, I couldn’t see very much, but luckily the thing wasn’t completely obscuring my vision, so I was able to vaguely keep an eye on where we were going.

We passed around the side of Kendal Creek, or at least that’s what I thought it was. The constant pitching and yawing of the pickup had my guts churning and sweat running down the sides of my face, soaking into where the bag was tied loosely around my throat.

The ride had been silent except for the near-constant sound of spitting out both. I was in the back, smooshed between the two very large sisters. One of them – the one called Loretta Jr. – was actually startlingly attractive. The other one, Jackie Jr., was vastly less so, but she was so strong she could probably have picked a bulldozer up out of a pothole. If, you know, that was something you needed.

After what I figured was a half hour or so, I piped up: “Where are we going?”

At first, no one answered, so I decided to shout. When I raised my voice above the din of air rushing through open, spit-enabling windows, one of the two sisters said something I couldn’t understand.

“What?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

“Home,” I finally understood. “Home for us, anyways.”

Her drawl was vaguely attractive, or at least interesting, but the smell of tobacco was anything but. “Home?” I asked, wanting to start a conversation so I felt less like a prisoner, even though I didn’t know what else I could be with a bag over my head. “Where’s that?”

I felt her huge shoulders shrug next to me. “Half hour from the Creek, or so. I guess. Ain’t really sure.”

After another few moments of wailing wind and spitting sounds, I started getting a knot in my throat. “Why?” I asked.

“We live there,” she answered, simply. Afterwards, she gave a chuckle like I was an idiot. “Why else would we go home but not for livin’ there?”

“Right,” I said. “What I mean is, what are you doing with me? Why am I going home with you?”

“Oh,” she turned her head and exhaled. The sweet twang of chaw on her breath gave me a little shot of nausea, but I was fairly surprised this girl was being as nice as she was. If nothing else, I didn’t want to piss her off. For one thing, she could probably rip my head off if she wanted. For another, yeah well, that’s a good enough reason for me, thanks.

I fell into a sort of meditative trance as the road went on, and grew bumpier and more filled with potholes. I kept thinking back about Dan and about how Dax had sworn to protect me, and how for some reason, after all that, it just took some bullshit nothing exchange with him to set me running. I had to stop, I knew it. If I was going to survive this life, at least long enough to get something approaching a happy ending, I needed to come to terms with the fact that Dax actually
wanted
me.

On the last turn we took, the old Ford lurched and pitched until I was absolutely sure I was going to end up a sidebar story in the
Hillbilly Gazette
. Fear of death notwithstanding, which honestly wasn’t as strong as it probably should have been, I grabbed hold of a very meaty hand and held on for dear life.

I heard a patronizing chuckle from my left. It was the quiet girl this time, laughing at me. “What?” I shot fiercely as the truck
whumped
down to the ground in a way that couldn’t possibly be good for the struts. “What’s so funny?”

“You snort when you get nervous, you know,” she said. Her voice didn’t sound as pinched, and her breath didn’t reek of chew. I kept telling myself to be thankful for small things.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m sorry for snorting when I thought we were going to roll over.”

“Pa’s a good driver,” she said. I felt a hand on my shoulder. “You’re gonna be all right,” she said. “He’s as soft hearted as he is gruff-actin’. He thinks he’s going to make a play for Kendal Creek with you as a hostage, but we all know better.”

The sound of palm smacking against face caught my immediate attention. “Shut yer damn mouth, Loretta,” said the sweet-breathed girl. “We’re gonna string her up and take over that town. We’re gonna get all them houses and that money and them pies from Wilma’s restaurant. And we’re gonna eat all of it!”

“Why would you eat money?” I asked. Jackie chuffed, plainly irritated. “And it isn’t like you can just storm the town and take over, there’s a lot of people there.”

The sound of static-laden AM radio wafted back from the cab. The boys up front were listening to some kind of bizarre, weirdo call-in show about Bigfoot. For some reason, every time they mentioned him, they started laughing like they were half drunk and listening to a Richard Pryor album.

“What’s so funny?” I finally asked.

“Bigfoot,” Loretta said. “Of all the things to be afraid of in these woods, one of them big ol’ jackasses isn’t one of them.”

“Wait, what?” I asked, slightly startled at the answer.

There was no more time for idle questions though. The truck pulled – or rather, heaved – to a stop, coming to rest in the center of a semi-circle of rickety, obviously old cabins. A hand grasped my wrist, and another pressed on my shoulder until I took the hint and let them escort me out of the truck. My feet crunched on the dirt. It felt like the hardscrabble ground of a desert that hadn’t seen rain in far too long.

Seconds later, the bag was pulled off my head, and I blinked in the darkness. The moon shone, a pure silver globe, high in the sky. I realized that not only were these cabins of very dubious construction – they were in the middle of a clearing. “Where are we?” I asked, still blinking. “And why did you put a bag on my head? You know I could sorta see through it.”

The old man, who called himself Jack, slapped one of his male children on the side of the head. “You goddam idjit,” he said. “I told ya get a bag she couldn’t see through.”

“Gee pa,” the younger one whined, “it were either that or a garbage sack.”

The older one sighed, exhaling slowly. “Well I s’pose it wouldn’t do to kill her. Daxon’s already gonna be cranked up at us, don’t need him with a dead mate to avenge.”

I closed my eyes slowly, tightly, and wished that I could pinch the bridge of my nose to stave off the stress headache I already felt building behind my eyes.

“So where are we?” I asked again, relatively certain I wasn’t going to get any very clear answers, at least not yet.

“Home,” Loretta said. “For whatever it is, we’re home.”

I felt the air escape my lungs in a rush. I knew, right then and there, that one way or another I wasn’t gonna be the same when this was all over with. I just hoped, somewhere in the back of my head, that I hadn’t pissed Dax off enough that he wouldn’t bother looking for me. Somehow, I doubted that was an issue.

I wasn’t sure of anything, not at all, as I voluntarily sat down in a very old rocking chair, and had my legs bound first together, and then to the legs of the chair. My hands were looped behind my body and secured. I didn’t know what the hell I’d gotten myself into, but I knew one thing was for sure: whatever
did
happen, at least it was more interesting than spending another second of my life locked up in Dan’s suburban, middle-class prison. I guess that’s why I had the smile on my face that made those Creightons think I was completely whacko.

Although, if there’s anything I’ve learned in my life, it’s that neighbors will talk about their crazy neighbor, and maybe make fun of them. The way the circling bears were watching me cautiously and regarding me with a certain amount of worry made me realize this might be my ticket out of here.

Because if you act crazy
enough
? Nobody, but nobody, fucks with the crazy neighbor.

––––––––

H
old me
, I whispered fitfully, restlessly, throwing my head from side to side.
Please, Dax, don’t let me go. Don’t let anything happen to me, I—