Bearly Hanging On (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 6) (26 page)

“That’s an even better question than asking who I work for. I can’t really answer either of them with any degree of certainty.”

Ryan threw another brutal roar and along with it, two more of those suited men who kept climbing into the cave.

“Well, I wasn’t really going to ask that, but now that you mention it, I may as well go ahead and indulge you. After all the goose chase and the bullshit, you don’t even know who you work for?”

“It’s complicated,” Branson said. “Very, very complicated. Too complicated for right now, but I’m almost certain they want to collect you as a specimen because you got a taste of my fluids and didn’t die.”

“That’s,” Jamie let her voice trail off for a moment. “That’s a very strange way of saying things.”

Seeing a break in the action, Branson dragged Jamie to her feet. “He’s not going to let that happen though,” he pointed at Ryan. “And neither am I. I’d never—”

Without warning, Branson stiffened like he’d just been blasted with electricity. His fingers all went rigid, extending straight out, stiffly from his hands. His hair stood on end, his body turned gray, then blue, and then gray again before all of his veins adopted that odd, haunting blue color permanently. Jamie grabbed him by the lapels, held him upright for a second before he turned into a six foot tall dead weight.

No matter how much she exerted, her knees buckled, and he fell to the ground with a thump.

Briefly free from assault, Ryan turned to her, his ursine eyes wild and flaring but still Ryan’s. He cocked his head, and she understood perfectly. “No idea,” Jamie said. “But we gotta get out of here.”

With a nod, Ryan grabbed the limp Branson, tucked him under one arm and started toward the mouth of the cave. “Can... can you carry us?” Ryan managed to push out of his bear-like mouth, with an obvious deal of effort. “Not long, just...”

“Both of you?” Jamie was shaking her head, even as she said yes. “I’ll try anyway.”

By the time they got to the entrance, another pair of sunglasses began to peer up, but Ryan gave both of them a
real
nasty kick. Jamie grabbed him, latching onto the fur on his shoulders.

“Run,” she hissed. “Run and jump. If there’s any luck, the updraft will catch me. If not,” she trailed off.

“If not?”

“We’re hamburger.”

With a smirk, a nod, and a grunt of effort, the big bear barreled forward, feet pounding on the stone. He hit the edge, and like an Olympic platform diver, flexed his legs, and exploded out. Jamie stretched her wings, closed her eyes, and felt a massive weight drag her downward.

She pushed, she drove her wings wide open. She closed her eyes, waiting for her feet to be separated from her body.

Instead, her wings were filled with a gust, she felt lighter, much lighter. She shot straight up into the air, furry cargo and limp cargo in tow. They sailed over a clutch of trees, across a small creek, all on the blessing of inertia. Jamie pumped her wings, trying her best to stay in the air, but they were losing altitude, and quickly.

Losing, losing... lost.

The crash when they hit the ground numbed her legs. Branson careened into a tree trunk, and Ryan broke one off almost at the base. But for the moment? For the moment, they were safe.

*

“A
re they gone?” Jamie lifted her head out of the dirt just long enough to realize that her ears were no longer being brutalized. “And if they are, what on earth just happened?”

Branson, with his sunglasses off and his hair completely a rat’s nest of a mess, looked up. His skin had gone back to his normal pallor. None of the weird veins or shiny gray skin was still present, but his eyes had taken on a very strange, hypnotic, sparkling silver ting. He seemed dazed, like he’d been taken out of his own head for a moment and then suddenly dropped back in.

“Ryan Drake?” he asked with a look of utter disbelief on his face. “Did I arrest you?”

Ryan quirked a dark eyebrow and showed his un-cuffed wrists.

“You don’t remember anything that just happened?” Jamie asked, brushing herself off. The throbbing, awful noise was nowhere to be found. Neither were the other suits, or that helicopter, or anything else. The forest was just dead quiet.

He shook his head and ran his hand over his distressed hair, putting back into something resembling order. “I remember getting here, and I remember you,” he indicated Jamie with a slight nod, “on my back. But that’s it.”

Oddly, his voice had stopped sounding quite so practiced, robotic and distant. His irises twitched. “Why can I see so well?” she asked. “I’m a bat. Vision isn’t exactly our strong suit. And, why did you turn gray?”

“And why did you save her?” Ryan asked, grabbing the agent by the lapel, but only half-heartedly, as though even he didn’t believe this strange specimen of humanity was the enemy. “You could’ve taken me in. All those years chasing me, and you just... didn’t. Kind of a letdown, really.”

Ryan stared at the disheveled man as he stood, and straightened himself out.

“You can see?” Branson finally asked. “Did you drink my fluids?”

“That’s the second time you said that,” Jamie said. “Is there some reason you tactfully avoid saying the word blood? Because I’m starting to think you’re a robot, I drank motor oil, and I need to get some ipecac.”

“No, no, no... no... no... no,” Branson’s words sounded very much like a stuttering record player. He looked strangely at peace though, especially with the sparkling silver eyes and the hair swept backward out of his face. “No, no, no, no, no, blood? Blood. Fluids. Blood-fluids.”

“Uh, Ryan?” Jamie asked, grabbing her bear by the arm. “Do you think maybe we should take him somewhere before he, er, short circuits?”

The two of them stared, watching helplessly as Branson began jittering around. His hands were almost vibrating, they moved so quickly. “He’s either a robot or a hummingbird,” Ryan offered. “And judging from the eyes, and the lack of a beak, I’m leaning away from hummingbird.”

“Robot?” Branson asked. “No, no, no, no, no. Fluids, blood?”

“I hope
I
didn’t make him blow a fuse.”

He coughed, had one last, long full-body shiver, and then immediately came to his senses again. “Why do you keep asking if I’m a robot?”

“Well then what
are
you?” Jamie asked.

Without any warning, the suited man – or whatever he was – stood up on his tiptoes, and fell face first into the dirt.

––––––––

“W
hat can I do for you two crazy kids? Marital therapy? Already? I didn’t know you were married. I usually keep on top of things, you know. Oh, my,” Jenga let his mouth fall open and then narrowed his eyes at the limp body of Agent Branson.

“He’s breathing,” Ryan said.

“But it’s weird,” Jamie finished for him. “Real weird.”

“Oh, hum, well here.” Jenga clapped twice, and Atlas emerged from the back of the building-slash-lab in a pair of old, torn sweatpants, and a shirt that revealed his midriff. “Atlas, carry him to the back. I’ll need to root around in there.”

The phrase ‘root around’ got Ryan and Jamie to exchange a glance. The enormous, stitched up bear merely gave a nod, grunted slightly, and did as he was asked.

“Is he okay?” Jamie asked as soon as Atlas was through the door. “He seems, I dunno, down?”

“He had to come home early today from work. He wouldn’t keep his clothes on, and kept waving himself all about. Some sort of town ordinance against that sort of behavior. Now, before I get any further with all this, did either of you have anything to do with his fluids?”

“Ugh, God!” Jamie threw her hands in the air, exasperated. “What is it with the fluid thing? Yes, Ryan and I were in the cave, he was coming at us, and I jumped on him. I meant to drain him just enough so we could get away, but something... I dunno, flared up, and I flew off him. And now I can see in the dark.”

Jenga lifted an eyebrow and fished a small light out of the breast pocket of his sagging ’57 Chevy-covered shirt. “Interesting,” he said, his voice trailing off as he pushed Jamie into a seat and stared into her pupils. “Does this hurt?”

He blew straight into her open eyeball, making her recoil and blink. “Hurt, no, but that’s pretty irritating.”

“This?” He flashed the light straight into her pupil again, flickering it around in a circle.

She shook her head. “Sensitive, maybe. If I stared at it for long, I’d probably get a headache. But nothing out of the ordinary.”

“How long has it been?”

She shrugged and looked in Ryan’s direction. “Hour or so? Maybe a little longer?”

Atlas emerged from the back, and as soon as he noticed Jamie, his sullen look became a wide, excited, beaming smile. “JA...MIE!” he howled, and snatched her up in a hug that left her feet dangling off the ground, kicking a little, like a tall man picking up a toddler.

“Hi Atlas,” she said, giving him a little peck on the cheek as he set her back to earth. “Doing okay?”

“O... okay now,” he said. “I love you, Jamie.”

“Aww,” she cooed. “I love you, too. Thanks for taking that guy back there.”

From the back room, the sound of Agent Branson’s voice came in confused and slightly angry bursts. “I tied... tied down alien. Made him... made mad.”

“Alien is such a rude word,” Jenga said with a smile that was not only far too casual for what had just been said, was also rather like he already knew. “Agent Branson isn’t really an alien. Not in the flying saucer sorta way.”

“Uh... right,” Ryan said. “So what in the world did Jamie just bite, and what has been chasing me for the past decade?”

“Yeah, and why did he keep saying fluid instead of blood?”

Instead of answering, Jenga just beckoned them to the back of the larger-than-it-looks office building. “Better to see than to explain,” he said. “Won’t make any sense unless you do.”

The screeching complaints grew louder and louder as they made their way to the back, but when Atlas pulled the curtain back, Agent Branson was fully intact except that his hair was in a pile beside him.

“His face is gone,” Jamie said flatly. “At this point I’ll believe anything.”

“It isn’t
his
face,” Jenga said helpfully as Atlas mopped a suspicious looking stain. “He wears it to make people more comfortable. This may be the only time you ever see him like this. Apparently, you having fed on him short circuited his brain and—”

“I
knew
it!” Jamie said. “I knew I broke him somehow. There’s no way I didn’t.”

“Not a robot,” Branson said defensively. “Can’t break. You just surprised me is all.”

As Ryan and Jamie both approached the table for a closer look, Jenga stopped them. “I have to warn you. This is going to be... different. I don’t want you to be—”

“Oh my
God
!” Ryan gaped at the man on the table. “He doesn’t have a face at all! It’s just like Madonna in
Dick Tracy
. Just a blank sorta... face? Not face?”

“Shocked,” Jenga finished what he was saying before he got cut off. “And yes, it is a bit odd, but remember, he has feelings too.”

Branson – or whatever his real name was – grunted as Atlas inserted what seemed to be a garden hose directly into the side of his neck, but made no other hint that it caused him any pain.

“Probably what happened is that when you fed on him, his fluids backed up in response. You got a very small amount, and then they stopped flowing. I’m massaging them back to normal. He should be fine in an hour or two.”

Apparently, ‘massaging’ meant that Atlas was hooking him up to a car battery, and shocking the hell out of him while some copper-colored mess came out of the garden hose. Jamie watched for about three seconds before it was time to look away.

“And that’s going to make him
better
?” she asked, glad for an excuse not to watch anymore.

“Oh, yes, I’m sure of it,” Jenga said cheerfully. “Atlas, turn that crank a little harder.”

“And,” Jamie said, looping her arm through Ryan’s, “that is where we take our graceful exit.”

She pulled him toward the door, but just before they exited, she heard a squawking noise, a sputter, and then some very uncomfortable-sounding words in a voice that vaguely resembled Branson’s, but with a healthy dose of phlegm. “You’re safe,” he croaked.

“Huh?” Ryan stiffened and turned back. “What about all those guys who tried to bum rush me in the cave?”

Branson shook his head... thing. “Recalled. They think I’ve been deactivated.”

“Oh, is that what this is?” Jenga held a small metal cylinder between his thumb and forefinger. “Some kind of sensor?”

The not-alien nodded. “I am now officially off the record. The only problem is I have to find somewhere to be. To go.”

“Jamesburg,” Jamie said with a smirk, and a squeeze of Ryan’s hand. “There’s always room for one more. Or, you know, fifty or sixty.”

Branson let out a groan, and his head thumped backward against Jenga’s examination table.

“Which reminds me,” she said. “I think you were talking about needing a place?”

Ryan smiled back. “I guess I’m not looking anymore, huh?”

“Happy to keep you,” Jamie said, as they walked through the wind-chimes, the aisles of odd poultices and the strange smelling cauldrons. “If you’re willing to keep me, that is.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said, leaning in for a soft, gentle kiss that dragged a tingling surge through the bottoms of Jamie’s feet, all the way to her scalp.

She grabbed at him, running her fingers through the hair on the back of his head, latching on and refusing to let him go, at least for a moment. When he pulled away, slowly, leaving his taste on her lips, Jamie sucked a deep breath, inhaling Ryan’s scent, and letting the warmth wash over her before she opened her eyes.

A slow, soft clapping sound emanated from behind them. When Jamie turned her head, she saw Atlas, smiling, drooling just a little, and clapping.

“That might be our cue to take it somewhere else,” Ryan said, giving Jamie another one of those smiles that turned her into jelly. “Think you can carry me all the way to the house?”