Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Broken Pine Bears Book 1) (13 page)

She looked off in the distance, out the window over her desk. The trees outside were still. No wind blew right then, no rain fell. Jill sucked a deep breath through her nose.

The only proof I have that they were here is that I can still smell them in the room. I smell their sweat, and our,
she paused, giggling and then immediately feeling stupid about the giggling.
Our sex in the air. I’ve never felt anything like that before, never felt more alive, more protected. Maybe there really is something to all that fate business in the first place.

Her hand went to the mark on her chest that tingled every time she thought of Rogue or King.
This mark on my chest,
she wrote,
King said it was some kind of alpha mark, something that marked me as the fated mate of the two alphas. He said a lot of things though, and some of it seemed a little out there. But still, I have always wondered about this thing.

Without thinking about it, she realized that she was thinking about
them
. Her mind naturally went to Rogue and King, and whatever it was they were protecting in the forest.

They mentioned cubs
, she wrote.
But I don’t know if that means there are cubs already, or if they are the last members of a dead... tribe? Actually, as I write this, I realize I don’t know the first damn thing about them at all. But in the moment, details and sociology hadn’t been very important. The only thing on my mind was giving in, letting my animal instincts take over. Feral, wild, unreasonable. Maybe that’s the lesson here?

Her thoughts trailed off again, briefly back to those two strange men. Why would they want anything to do with this place? With these bears? They both certainly acted like they knew more than they were letting on.

Been here two weeks,
she wrote.
And I haven’t done anything. Jacques will be here – shit!

She wrote the curse, and then said it out loud. It had been almost a week since his previous visit. Another delivery was coming; food, water, medical supplies, medicine. And she needed to send something back with him to convince her colleagues, and her grant-givers, not to pull the project out from under her. Like a contractor with a half-finished house that he hadn’t worked on for a month, she needed to prove that she was actually doing something with the resources she’d been given.

“Well,” she said, “I guess for once in my life, it wouldn’t hurt to bullshit a report. I’m probably the only person I know who never has. First time for everything,” she said as she opened the laptop again and began to type out a bunch of horseshit observations.

Including threesomes with werebear alphas
.

She laughed, then bullshitted the best bullshit she’d ever seen.

*

“J
ill!” it was Jacques, shouting in his thick Louisiana drawl. “I thought maybe you’d been kidnapped by wolves or something!”

The trek back to the landing zone was uneventful, but even so it took several hours to hike the miles through undergrowth and brush. And, knowing what she did about the local populations, she had to make sure she wouldn’t have any trouble getting to her gun if something happened along that demanded attention.

She waved as she emerged from the forest, smiling and trying her best to hide the slight limp she’d taken on from soreness in her hip. “Nope,” she called back. “No wolves.”

Her skin crawled just saying the word. “What do you have for me?”

Mission stop talking about myself, accomplished
.

The pilot started going over the shipping manifest. Nothing out of the ordinary – powdered milk, military style rations, fire starters, some bacteria to put in her composting toilet, the bare necessities, so to speak.

“Anyway, ain’t much this time,” he said as he finished going over the backpack full of stuff she had to lug back into the woods. “But it
is
enough that you shouldn’t be carrying it on a bad hip. What happened?”

Shit. I’m terrible at faking pretty much everything. I hope that report isn’t too transparent.

“It’s nothing,” Jill said. “I stepped wrong over a root a couple miles back. No big.”

“You sure? Don’t seem like a very good idea to be out here alone with a screwy hip.”

“I’m not alone,” she said, before she thought. Immediately, a questioning look crept over her pilot’s face. “I mean, there’s plenty of supplies, the hike isn’t a big deal. It takes a while to get to camp, but it’s mostly flat ground. I just need to be more careful.”

He was nodding, slowly. “You sure you’re okay?” he asked again. “I don’t wanna...”

“What?” Jill asked, before she noticed his eyes were focused on the butt of Rogue’s pistol, which was sticking out the top of her shorts. “Oh,” she said with a grin. “Indiana Jones never traveled without insurance, right?”

Jacques laughed. “Indy was a smart one, so are you. You’d have to be crazy to be out here without some way to fend off the bears if they get unruly. Can I see that thing?”

Not able to think of any way to avoid letting Jacques look at the gun without seeming weird, she shrugged, and handed it over. As the heft of Jill’s impeccably cleaned pistol left her hand, her pilot whistled in appreciation. “Nice piece, this. A .357, huh? That’s gotta kick like hell. You shoot this thing much? I mean, it’s a pretty hefty ol’ piece for a—”

“For a girl? Don’t try it, wiseass. I’m a foot taller than you. And anyway, I’ve used it plenty. In fact, I ventilated a couple werewolves with it since I got here.”

No lie like the truth, huh?

“You know why I always liked you, Miss Jilly?” he said, quirking a smile.

“My charm, my wit?”

“Yeah, that,” Jacques gave the gun a final looking over and handed it back. “And the fact that you can somehow make the most ridiculous stories sound absolutely true. Werewolves, huh?”

She shrugged, stuffing the gun back in her waistband. “Silver bullets, too,” she offered. “Gotta use the right tool for the job.”

“You sure you don’t want me to help you with this stuff this time?” Jacques asked, chuckling. “Bum hip and all?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

Nodding slowly, Jacques stepped back up into the helicopter’s pilot seat, sped up the blades, and lifted off. “Stay safe!” he called down. “Bring me some werewolf hides next time! Oh, here, take this, you need it more than I do – don’t keep that thing in your pants! Not saying you sweat all the time, but...” He unhooked something from his belt and hurled it toward her.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jill shouted over the thrumming rhythm of the chopper’s propeller. She bent over and plucked a holster off the ground, vaguely aware of it as she yelled: “They disappear though, right after you shoot them.”

“I’m sure,” he shouted back. “I’m sure they do. See you in a week!”

As he lifted off, he gave her a loud
“Arroooooo!”
that faded into whipped up cloud of dust that blew up from the gusts of his chopper blades.

Nodding, and squinting against the sun and the dust, Jill waved at her old friend as he took off over the treetops. “Shit,” she muttered, turning back to the path. “If only you knew.”

––––––––

A
t some point you start to question whether or not the things you think are real, really
are
.

For Jill, that took three days. A week of nothing – no contact from her bears, no wolves howling, no nothing. She spent her time poking around for the thing she wanted the most: Rogue and King.

Or, at least, some sign that the strange, secretive bears she’d always thought existed, actually did. Or some clue that maybe she wasn’t insane, or that she hadn’t just wasted a four million dollar grant with a bunch of made up bullshit slightly less ridiculous than Bigfoot.

The self-doubt was starting to crush her.

Then again, it always had.

As she packed for another day trek into the woods to find... anything, Jill’s thoughts turned back to her first days working for Fred.

“And this,” he’d said, “is why you don’t say too much when you propose a grant for some edge project that you think no one is going to care about.”

He’d plopped the newest issue of
Science
, just about the only journal that matters to an explorative biologist, onto Jill’s desk about eight minutes after she’d walked in with a head full of dreams. She’d had these ideas about a population of bears in Yellowstone. The problem was, that for whatever reason, this small group of grizzlies had stopped breeding. They weren’t in any danger, they had plenty of food, they’d just stopped.

“This is why you don’t go to conferences. And if you do, it’s all lip service.” Fred sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say, but just take a look.”

When she saw the cover of the magazine, her heart hit the pit of her stomach. This was everything. Every shred of energy she’d poured into getting this grant all went to utter shit.

“How?” she asked, flipping to the Awarded Grants section. “I mean... how did this happen? How did I get undercut so fast?”

“Fungal growth in forest floor causing Yellowstone grizzly breeding problems? New grant issued - $5m, Dr. Dan Lindemann, GlasCorp Pharmaceuticals.”

Fred looked like he was going to either comfort her or shake his head disapprovingly. Thankfully, he went with the first option. He usually did, which Jill always appreciated. He shrugged. “Well,” he’d begun, “GlasCorp is as close to an evil empire as you’re going to find. They have teams of scientists who do nothing but go to conferences and snipe projects. Especially things that they can somehow twist into extremely expensive drug research.”

“But,” Jill had cut in, “what’s the point? Five million is worth about a buffalo head nickel to those guys. GlasCorp is worth... what? A hundred billion?”

Fred pursed his lips again. “Yeah, well,” he’d said. “The thing is, they aren’t interested in the money. They’re interested in keeping people from figuring out ideas that might compete with them someday.”

With that, Jill pushed back from her desk, in a huff. “This is stupid!” she’d said. “I’m trying to get some bears back to making babies. What the hell does that have to do with drug patents?”

He was still just shaking his head. “They think they found something – or rather, you did, and so they stole it. That’s kind of what they do. But anyway, no reason to be upset. There will always be something else that comes down the pipe.”

Shaking her head, Jill laced up her boots and looked over at the pistol she had laying on the bed. Little did Fred Stanton know, when he told her that something else would come down the pipe, he was sending her down a rabbit hole that would take three years to dig through.

And then, when she did? She let out a bark of laughter. When she did, she ended up in the middle of the Appalachian forest, in some weird place between the two Virginias, mated to a pair of werebears. It ended with her shooting a
goddamn werewolf
and then being comforted and sexed up by a pair of bears, and—

Before she knew it, tears were rolling down Jill’s cheeks. It was too much. Too absurd, too ridiculous.

“I’ve got to be fucking crazy,” she said to herself, grabbing two handfuls of hair and shaking her head. She sat, heavily, on the bed, then slid down to the floor, shaking her head the whole time. “I’m nuts, I imagined everything, I’m fucking nuts.”

She focused on the beam of sunlight coming through the closed blinds, letting her brain fixate into tunnel vision. “None of this shit makes any sense,” she said under her breath. “None of this is
real
. It’s all make believe, all a bunch of bullshit kid stories that I think I’m living in.”

The mark on her chest tingled, then itched, but she forced herself to ignore it. “An itchy birthmark? That’s supposed to convince me that shape shifting bears are real? Holy...”

Her complaining at herself quickly devolved into just regular old sobbing. After a few seconds, the sobbing gave way to shaking and then to the worse-than-crying silence that came when Jill’s throat was too raw to keep making noise, and her eyes were too puffy to make any more tears.

And then, the mark on her chest tingled again, almost like it was taunting her. She reached up and touched it, immediately reminded that everything
was
real. The pistol on her bed with the flattened bullet next to it on the nightstand did the same thing. Jill reached over and grabbed the crackled silver disc, turning it over in her fingers as the cold bit deep.

She watched the sun glint off the cracks, and turned her other hand over, watching the circle of shadow dance over her knuckles. For a moment, that entertained her, but then, the circle vanished and the entire room darkened.

“Storm?” she asked the empty room, turning around and poking two fingers through the blinds, peeking outside. Thick, heavy, carpet-like black clouds hung in the small space of sky visible from Jill’s cabin. As the rain started to fall, it felt to her like her tears were being externalized, like her sadness, her helpless feelings, taken outside and given to the weather instead of being buried in her heart.

Anything was better than the doubt being inside.

Thunder boomed, and a flash of lightning briefly lit the entire world.

On the table, her as-yet-unused shortwave radio fuzzed to life. It sounded like someone turning the dial, scanning through FM channels. Static interspersed with short bursts of sound issued from the single round speaker.

Another peal of thunder rattled the windows of the cabin. Another round of static, and then scanning noises came from the radio, but as she sat there listening to the slightly relaxing white noise, Jill heard something that sounded like voices. One voice at first, but then joined by a second. She thought maybe she was picking up a signal from the Forest Service, but the next words she heard chilled her bones.

“Gen... Draven,”
a voice said. It was broken up by crackles in the airwaves, but the message was clear enough.
“Draven ... you copy?”