Can't Bear To Run (Kendal Creek Bears, #1) (13 page)

“Hey! Wake up!”

My eyes shot open well before I had anything resembling consciousness. The first sensation I had was a tight, pulling, pinching feeling in the base of my neck. I’d been asleep, apparently, and had managed to flop my neck over to the side and keep it there for long enough to get the king of all cricks in it. I let out a long, groaning sound of ache, pain and protest. It took a few seconds before I remembered I was tied into a chair. “What time is it?” I asked weakly.

“Time?” A soft, old voice, that had obviously seen a whole lot of years, asked. “Time don’t much matter out here, sweets.”

“Uh,” I blinked hard. “Yeah it does, especially since I haven’t used the bathroom in however long I’ve been here plus four hours, and I’d prefer not to rupture all over the place.”

What can I say? Easy to embarrass I am absolutely not. Especially when the issue at hand is bladder pain because God almighty does that hurt.

The old man laughed softly, with the faintest whisper of a wheeze at the end of his laugh. “About six hours,” he said. “Need to stretch your legs?”

Before I could answer, I heard the slick squeaking sound of a knife blade cutting through nylon rope. Instantly, disabling prickles flared through my fingers and toes as blood flooded back into them. At first it was crippling pain and then as he helped me to my feet, my ginger steps gave me awful shocks the likes of which I’d never felt. My knees were weak and my feet ached at least as bad as my neck.

“Why are you letting me up?”

“You think I should keep you tied down for a day or two? You have any idea how bad that is for your circulation? They say you shouldn’t sit down for more than a couple of hours without stretchin’ yer legs and all. Like on an airplane?”

I nodded dumbly. “Right, I just mean, well it’s not every day you have kidnappers willing to just let you go.”

Immediately I felt a creepy sort of comfort with Jack Creighton. He was ancient, and had a fairly odd smell of something I could only identify as a mixture of a rodeo and a mountain man. But I’ll be damned if Loretta Jr. hadn’t called him exactly right.

As I slowly walked to the open air toilet to which he led me, I couldn’t help but laugh.

“What’s so damn funny?” he asked, trying his best to be gruff and frightening.

“Oh nothing. It’s just that when we were in the truck and I was coming back here, Loretta told me you were too softhearted to ever be much of a kidnapper. Although I’m pretty irritated at all this, and I still have no clue at all why I’m here.”

I sighed with relief as I had maybe the longest single pee of my life. Outside, Jack was alternating between whistling and sucking on his teeth. He didn’t’ answer me, not at first, so I figured he was either hard of hearing, or didn’t have an actual answer.

“You’re here,” he said slowly, as though he was coming up with the words one at a time, “because I feel like it’s something I have to do.”

“Now you’ve said just about the only thing I didn’t anticipate,” I said sighing and stretching my knees with a few deep knee bends. “What’s all that supposed to mean?”

“Daxon has enemies, sweets,” Jack said. “And one of them is meaning to move on him tonight. Or if not tonight, tomorrow. He’s done me enough good turns that I couldn’t let you get mixed up in things.”

“Okay, wait,” I said, taking stock. “You kidnapped me because someone is planning to attack Dax? I don’t have any idea how that’s supposed to make any sense.”

“It ain’t,” Jack Creighton said. “And I can’t really tell you much without breaking a whole bunch of rules that are so old that not even I remember where they’re from.” After a few seconds of thick anticipation, he added, “That’s an old joke.”

“Right,” I said, laughing despite myself. “So I guess I’m not going to get any answers?”

He shook his head, which I got a good look at for the first time. He had a liver-spotted head, bald on the crown with a wild fringe of white around it, like Ben Franklin. His eyes were watery, tired and deep-set, but he looked alert – surprisingly so. As though he took in every single detail around him without any effort at all. He had a hawkish nose with wiry hairs protruding from his nostrils. His thin lips were framed with a thick mustache that all but hid that he was missing at least a couple of teeth.

From behind us, in the direction of the semicircle of cabins, was a flickering electric lamp that hummed evenly, spurting with shocks. “Bugs,” Jack said. I turned to look at him, a question marking my arched eyebrows.

“It’s a bug zapper. The mosquitoes, they fly in, they hit the blue thing, and—“

On cue, an unfortunate pest buzzed into the swinging lantern looking thing, popped and sizzled.

As though it were some kind of intense foreshadowing, Jack looked at me with an arched eyebrow of his own. “Things are comin’ to these parts that ain’t what we’re used to,” he said. “And I think you’re the first of them that might be any good.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Think of it this way. We got this secret little world, with all these magical rules and shadowy councils taking care of everything. Two months ago, the sheriff in Kendal Creek turned up dead, and no one knows what killed him.”

“That’s awful,” I said, picking at my hair. “But what does this have to do with me?”

He shrugged. “We need some new blood in these parts. Have for a long time. A real long time. And I can’t risk that – can’t risk you – getting caught up in one of the council’s bullshit moves.”

He led me back to the cabin.

Thunder roiled outside as we settled down into a pair of comfortable, but very old and shockingly ugly floral-patterned easy chairs. They sat on the front porch of the largest of the cabins, which was also the most stable looking of them. It was made of knobby, age-worn logs and shake wood shingles. Whoever built this thing – and I suspected I was sitting next to him – had known just how to do it. Everything was precisely fitted, and incredibly strong looking, and from what I could tell there weren’t any bolts or screws holding it together.

“Did you make this?” I asked.

“Yup. Whole damn thing. Well, at least the part of it that don’t look like a mess. Them cabins are all my boys’ doing.”

For a while we just sat and rocked as lightning flashed overhead, long streaks of blue-white gashes cutting violently through the black of the midnight sky. “What’s going to happen to me?” I finally asked. I had the feeling he wasn’t going to hurt me, but it never hurt to get some reassurance. “I’m not going to die, right?”

Jack Creighton laughed until his old jowls were wobbling. “If you think I’m going to kill you, then you read me all wrong.”

“Well you
did
surround me in my car and kidnap me.” I couldn’t help but crack a smile. It’s the damndest thing: I have no idea how or why, but for some reason, I just couldn’t be mad at this guy. Concerned, yes, of course. A little irritated, for sure. But I mean, it wasn’t like I had any idea where I was going, and if it was adventure I was looking for when I came on this idiot trip, I had certainly found it.

“Sorry about all that. But like I was sayin’ I don’t want Dax or you in any danger. He’s a good kid, real good kid. Sorta hot headed and growly and alpha-like, but I s’pose that’s fine considering what he is.”

“What
is
he, anyway?” I still wasn’t sure, although I knew that whatever he was, I really liked it. “I saw something, uh... kinda crazy back at the Creek. We were out front of the courthouse and someone – er I mean a bear, I guess, wandered up to the front door of the courthouse and turned into a big, naked guy.”

More whistle-tailed laughter. I was starting to get sick of how funny everything I said apparently was. It was like I kept saying everything that was the most obvious shit in the world.

“Well,” he drawled, “you expect a bear to be wearin’ pants? Only a few of them do that, and most of us see those ones as the weirdos.”

I snorted a laugh so hard that I had to in-laugh a little afterward. Trust me, this isn’t one of my favorite personal features. “So I wasn’t hallucinating?”

It was Jack’s turn to cackle. “It’s been so damn long since I met someone who wasn’t one of us that it strikes me as kinda funny when it’s surprising. The usual course is for a bell to clang, or a siren or something of that sort, I can’t remember exactly. Out here we don’t much worry about it, but over in the Creek, they care more. Anyways, when a hiker or some such comes on into town, they turn that thing on, and everyone knows not to do any shiftin’.”

My eyes were glassed over, in the sort of way people get when they’re told something they know is true, but that seems so completely ridiculous that belief is harder than trying to fool themselves into thinking they
didn’t
see what they saw. As though to prove his point, Jack Creighton stuck his hand up in front of his face, and showed me that he could change himself a finger at a time, into a bear.

The fur on his paw was gray and wiry, his claws thick and brown. “See?” he asked with a smile. “This sort of control only comes with age, you understand. Young’uns have a much tougher time not going whole hog, so to speak. The other trick is that we get a little rowdy. That’s why you’ll see ‘em turn when they fight or when they fu—uh, make love.”

“How old
are
you?”

“Why? You think I don’t have any lead in my pencil on account of my age?”

I blushed deeply and laughed from my gut. “Uh, well no, not exactly that. I just haven’t even heard my grandparents say ‘make love.’”

“I was bein’ polite,” Jack said. “It ain’t like to speak gruffly with a lady about.”

I nodded in an exaggerated, slightly sarcastic way. “Right, then, I stand corrected.”

“Hundred and forty-six,” he said flatly. “I expect I’ll keel over in five or ten years. We bears tend not to get so worked up over things like that.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You’re almost a hundred a fifty years old?”

“Yup.”

“Jesus.”

“Tell me about it. You think
you
get a stiff hip when you sleep wrong. Add, what, a hundred and ten to that?”

I turned the corners of my mouth down. “You’re pretty good at that. Yeah, I’m thirty-two. I don’t know the last time someone told me I was a young’un, but I sorta like it.”

“Same age as Dax,” he said. “I remember when he growed up and took over. Best thing that’s happened to the territory in ages. Almost overnight the fighting was cut in half. Few months later, almost no crime. But now, with the sheriff dead, things have turned a bit to shit.”

“I thought you didn’t swear in front of ladies.”

He looked at me with an expression of genuine confusion. “I ain’t swore. Wait, you mean shit? That ain’t a swear. Is it?”

“It’s sort of a half-swear, I guess. I think they can say it on TV now. Or,” I took a breath, “actually I don’t know. I haven’t had cable in a long, long time.”

“Cable?”

I stared in disbelief for a moment. “Like cable TV? Hundred and eighty channels and nothing to watch?”

“Sounds stupid,” he said. “Out here there ain’t much way to get such a thing. I just got some rabbit ears. Don’t see much anything except preachers preachin’ or some sleaze sellin’ baseball cards and swords.”

“That’s oddly specific.”

“You hear that?” With an almost unbelievable agility, he pulled himself up on the doorframe to fetch a shotgun that was mounted above the threshold. Only this wasn’t just a shotgun, this thing was a piece of hand-held artillery. Four barrels, four hammers, everything I’d ever hoped to find in an action movie was right in front of me. “You know how to shoot?” he asked.

“That thing? Shit, I think that’d blow my arm off.”

“Not this, sweets,” he said as he handed me a pearl-handled revolver that he’d had stuffed in his jeans. “This.”

I checked the cylinder and the safety. “I might’ve shot some targets once or twice. But why are you giving me this?”

“Somebody’s comin’. Can’t you hear that?”

I listened hard, but shook my head. Then I realized that the guy who had kidnapped me had just given me a gun. “What’s stopping me from shooting you and running away?”

He scrunched his eyes and looked off in the distance. “Oh, I’d say about forty miles of woods, probably more than one family of bears, and a whole bunch of pricks coming this way to try and take you back before Dax gets word that you’re out here. Besides, that thing ain’t gonna stop a bear for long.”

For a second I just watched him. “Yeah, I’d say that’s a few good reasons not to run away. Just seems a little strange to give your kidnapping victim a pistol.”

“You’re gonna need it,” he said. “Maybe. Here’s what’s going to happen. If this is who I think it is, you’re gonna head back into the cabin, find the locked door in the back and hide in the opposite closet.”

“Locked door?”

“My wife, she don’t like visitors,” Jack said with a wry grin. “Anyway, you head to that closet and you stay quiet. I’ll come get you. I’ll knock three times.” He tapped the butt of his shotgun on his porch with three rhythmic thuds to show me the pattern. “Just like that. If you don’t hear that, shoot before you think. Got it?”

I finally heard the noise. There was something crashing through the woods toward the cabin, but it sure didn’t sounds like a bunch of people, more like just one. “Jack,” I asked. “Am I crazy for trusting Dax when he said he was going to take care of me?”

He snorted. “There ain’t a bear in the woods I’d trust more than him. And if he said he’d do somethin’, that’s as good a guarantee as you’re gonna get.”

A pair of eyes. Yellow ones, flashing in the moonlight, blasted out of the woods. “Long time no see, Wyatt!” Jack shouted. “Run,” he said to me in a hissed whisper. “Now.”

I might be distractible and a more than a little impulsive. But when I’ve got a mission, I never stop until it’s finished. Even if the mission is to run away like a bat out of hell. Without a second thought, I charged through the screen door, throwing it backward so hard that it slapped against the frame. Seconds later I was making my way through darkened corridors. I could still hear Jack yelling at someone outside, and now I heard more than one voice answer his words, but I couldn’t seem to make out what they were saying.