Bearly Hanging On (The Jamesburg Shifters #6)(66)

“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.

*

“Are 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.”