Tears tracked down Lauren’s cheeks.
Something in his mind snapped. The bear broke free and he lost all control. The grizzly launched the ten or so feet down to the trail in one leap and slapped his claws into Shorty’s chest. The pistol flew into the trees, followed by pieces of the man’s body, but the bear didn’t stop moving. He barreled into the taller man as he struggled to swing the rifle. Finn knocked it away but the smuggler managed to squeeze off a round that caught him in the stomach.
The bear took care of that with another swipe of his claws, and the man dropped in a bloody heap, groaning in pain. Shorty, at least, was quiet.
Finn whuffled around them and used his paws to toss aside the weapons they carried, including giant fucking machetes, and to free the packs from their shoulders. Idiots. No wonder they went down so easily: they threw off their center of gravity carrying a heavy load, and thought they could fight effectively without good balance.
He didn’t feel as bad about killing them. Neither one would recover from the deep rents in their torsos unless someone carried their asses to a clearing and got a life-flight there in under an hour, but that was not the bear’s problem.
Something clicked behind him. Finn’s head swung around, prepared to attack if one of their compatriots decided to ambush him, and instead found Lauren holding one of the pistols in shaking hands. All of her had paled, and she sat on her butt and scooted backward toward the trees as she tried to aim.
At least she used both hands in a reasonable grip, instead of trying some ridiculous one-handed action hero nonsense.
She hyperventilated, her eyes wide and pupils huge, and shook her head. “I don’t want to shoot you. I don’t. I love all animals. Even ones that might e-e-eat me. Just let me leave. I don’t know where you came from and that’s okay, even though you should probably be hibernating right now or at least…oh God…eating a lot to store up for winter. Just d-d-don’t eat me. I don’t taste good, I promise, and there’s not a lot of meat on the bone, I can promise that too. Those guys look way more ap-ap-appetizing…”
She sucked in huge lungfuls of air but it didn’t seem to help.
Finn eased back to sit, hoping that would be less intimidating, but the tall guy groaned and rolled over. So Finn flicked him out of the way and the body whacked into a tree trunk hard enough that bones crunched. Lauren groaned and leaned over to barf, her grip on the pistol slackening.
He held his breath. He couldn’t comfort her—or even speak to her—as a bear, that much was obvious. Having a grizzly a few feet away wasn’t helping her nerves. Finn debated what to do as he watched her, but the sound of a radio on one of the bodies made the decision for him.
LAUREN POV
It wasn’t like she knew what happened in any detail after the first gun pointed at her. Her brain shorted out and she lost control over what she said or where she looked. All she saw was the barrel of the rifle and then the pistol, and all she heard was her breathing and the voice of the man who threatened to kill her if she didn’t tell him something she didn’t know. Which just made it harder to think and breathe and not pee all over herself.
She definitely thought things couldn’t get worse. How could they, with two men threatening to kill her and guns right in her face?
And then Finn started talking from somewhere in the trees, and her heart sank the rest of the way through her feet and into the dirt. Just wonderful. Of course. Her luck struck again. And he soundedpissed. Even worse than when he talked to the guy on the phone and demanded his money.
She’d resigned herself to a really, really awful day when things took yet another turn and the pistol pressed cold and awful against the back of her neck. Lauren barely took a shaky breath before something exploded out of the trees and then thepressure disappeared. She scrambled out of the way as a gun went off, and searched for a place to hide or run or climb.
Her legs gave out when she saw the rich brown fur and massive claws of…a grizzly bear. A real, breathing, furious grizzly bear with blood on his paws and flashing fangs. It killed the guy who’d been threatening her, then tossed around the taller guy like a ragdoll. And it looked at her, a growl slowly dying in its chest.
Lauren’s thoughts froze. She stared at it and heard every heartbeat in her ears like a clanging bell. Its eyes were a warm honey and far too intelligent for a ravening beast, and the small ears on its head reminded her of a teddy bear. But that didn’t make breathing any easier.
Especially when one of the awful men groaned and moved, and the bear lashed out and threw him into a tree. The dullthunkand snap of breaking bones turned her stomach the rest of the way, and Lauren lost what remained of her control. Bile rose up and she leaned out of the way to empty her already empty stomach. At least not eating a real dinner or breakfast gave her nothing much to yak up.
She expected to die any second when the grizzly decided to eat her, too. Even the pistol she’d managed to pick up from where the short guy dropped it didn’t make her feel any more confident. The bear grumbled, sitting back like a giant but friendly dog, and watched her. Waiting.
But waiting for what? For her to make a run for it so the bear could chase her down? For its bear friends to show up and join the picnic?
She squeezed her eyes shut. Oh hell. She was definitely losing her mind. Or at least her composure. She didn’t want to face down a grizzly and she sure as hell didn’t want to die in one’s jaws. She didn’t trust her legs to hold her if she tried to stand, and there was no way she could outrun or out-climb agrizzly. Lauren thought you were supposed to play dead around grizzlies, to avoid being attacked, so maybe just sitting there was the right decision. Of course the only good decision she made that day was a complete, freak accident because she was too scared to do anything else except barf.
Maybe she was a coward but she didn’t want to see the bear’s claws swinging at her head or its teeth getting closer to her throat. The air moved and the earthy smell of a giant wild animal swamped her. Lauren whimpered but it didn’t matter: the mouth got closer, heated breath making her flinch, and the teeth slowly closed around her arm to tug her out of her cowering crouch.
“Please please please,” Lauren whispered. She really didn’t want to be mauled by a grizzly. Was it too much to hope that the darn thing would just eat the two men and be too full to bother with her? “Oh my God, please don’t kill me. Or at least make it quick. I don’t think I can handle the pain for very long, and I’ll just scream a lot and you don’t need that.”
The grizzly made a soft bear sound, adjusted its toothy grip, and tossed her over its shoulder and onto its back. Lauren cracked one eye open. What the what? She sprawled across the broad, warm back as the grizzly lumbered a few steps. She slid down, ready to run, but froze as the bear made another annoyed sound and swung his head around to look back at her. Lauren couldn’t breathe. Okay. Message received.
She held tight to the bear’s fur as it moved into a rolling lope, though his stride hitched occasionally. Lauren didn’t know what the hell was going on. Bears didn’t usually carry live prey around with them, certainly not by having the prey ride on their back, while leaving two reasonably-sized meals behind in the dirt. Every time she started to slide off, whether on purpose or by accident, the grizzly would stop, adjust his stance, and shrug his shoulders around until she was more safely situated.
Lauren had to be hallucinating. She hadn’t eaten any weird mushrooms in the forest but who the hell knew. Maybe there were spores in the air or some kind of ley line or other magic in the trees. She wasn’t really riding a bear. She definitely wasn’t riding a bear and holding on to its fur as it lumbered along a trail.
Or she could have fallen as she ran and whacked her head on a rock, and imagined all of it happening while she lay in the grass and suffered a concussion. She couldn’t decide what was worse.
Or it was reality and she really had been kidnapped by a bear—bearnapped?—and was being taken to some cave to be eaten. Maybe that was the worst.
She tried to look on the bright side, though. She hadn’t been raped and murdered by those two dudes with guns, and the bear radiated heat like a furnace. Its fur was coarse on the surface but really soft underneath, and she worked her frozen hands closer to the beast’s skin to try and leech heat away.
