Madison

“Maybe we could call on some of your friends to help out?” Kean suggested.

“No,” she told him, shaking her head. “We’re on our own for this. They’re busy elsewhere.”

“Doing what?”

“Other missions,” she said cryptically. “I’m not at liberty to tell you about them.”

The hulking shifter shrugged. “Okay, well, it’s your funeral if you try to do this with just the seven of us. Assuming everyone comes along.”

Her eyes focused on him. “You don’t think they will?”

“No idea,” Kean replied. “You’ll likely get me and Pierce, probably Gavin too. But Maximus and Kassian? Who the hell knows. Complete toss-up.”

She swore. “We’re going to need them if we want to do this.”

Kean nodded in agreement.

“I need to see the place for myself,” she decided. “Take me there to have a look.” She bent over and grabbed her pack from where she’d been using it as a pillow.

Kean looked at her. “Seriously? It’s going to get dark in a few hours.”

She shrugged. “Better hurry then.”

The shifter threw his arms up in near immediate surrender. “Sure, why the hell not. Let’s go,” he said and walked into the forest, not waiting for her to catch up.

Madison charged after him, catching up to him before he’d gone too far. Slowing his pace, he glanced down at her. “You can trust me, you know. I reported everything I saw.”

“I know. It’s just…I need to see it myself, to truly get a proper picture. It’s not that I don’t believe what you’re telling me, but I can’t plan properly without having seen it myself. Does that make any sense?”

“Sort of,” he said with a shrug before continuing on, leaving her no choice but to follow him.

He led her deep into the forest, circling well around to the north of the base, where the ground started to flow uphill. Madison had thought herself in decent shape. She worked out regularly and tried to run as well. Her body was thick with muscle, though her affinity for pizza and ice cream ensured she wasn’t cut. It was a compromise, she figured.

But Kean was tireless, and he marched onward without pause, without mercy.

“Are we getting close?” she asked a while later, her breath becoming ragged as they kept moving up the incline.

“Just about,” the unflappable shifter replied, raising an arm to point up the slope. “See that huge tree?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Is that it?”

“No, it’s about five miles beyond it. I just used it as a marker.”

Madison stared at him in horror. “Five more miles?” she moaned.

“Hey, you wanted to come along,” he said with a dismissive shrug of his shoulders.

Madison growled and pushed past him, moving quickly up the slope, and past the indicated tree. She’d gone another fifty feet when she realized Kean was no longer following her. Turning, she saw him leaning up against the tree.

Her eyes narrowed. “I swear, if that’s the tree and you were messing with me, you are in big, big trouble, mister,” she threatened as Kean bent at the waist, keeping his laughter mostly contained so it didn’t carry too far through the forest.

Making her way back down the hill, she glared at him nonstop until she arrived at the base of the tree. Then she punched him in the stomach. Hard.

“Ow!” she yelped quietly, shaking her hand out. “What the hell are you made of, metal?”

To his credit, Kean didn’t answer the question. “Okay, so what now?” she asked.

“Climb on,” he said, and then he shifted before she could respond.

“Climb on?” she repeated as he once more shifted into a massive animal. “To that?” she pointed shakily at him.

The bear managed a fair representation of a human-style nod, while its eyes managed to roll at her response.

“Um, where?” she asked, trying to summon her courage. “Like, just fling myself on and hold on around your neck?”

Another reasonable facsimile of a nod.

“Okay, here goes nothing,” she said, tossing caution to the window and throwing herself at the bear, pulling tightly on its fur as handholds as she scrambled up the side, until she managed to mount it.

The bear yowled and made more than one pained-sounding noise as she did.

“Quit your whining,” she said, giving him a firm slap in the side. “You told me to climb on, without instructing me how or giving me any tips.”

The bear made an indignant noise, and then slowly began to stand up, forcing Madison to toss her arms around his thickly muscled neck, clamping down as best she could with her legs, and holding on for dear life.

Satisfied she was as secure as she was going to be, Kean dug his claws in deep and began to climb. The first few feet weren’t so bad. But the higher they got, the more Madison began to shake. At one point when he paused in the climb she glanced down.

“Oh shit,” she moaned, burying her face in his fur as she saw the ground sway underneath her.

Then she realized it wasn’t the ground swaying, it was the tree swaying. The tree with them in it.

“Kean, the tree is moving!” she yelped.

The bear just rumbled something she obviously couldn’t understand and kept climbing.

“Um, Kean. We’re really swaying now,” she said forcefully as they went ever higher.

He made a sound that could perhaps have been interpreted as “No shit,” but she wasn’t sure.

Finally he came to a halt, and with a combination of pointing and twisting of his body, made it clear that she was to step off onto the branch. Terrified, Madison forced her body to obey. After all, she had wanted to come out here, to have him take her up so that she could see the base. This was all her fault. She couldn’t stop now. She had to trust him that it would be okay.

For the second time that day, Madison put her faith in Kean, and stepped off the bear onto the branch, releasing her death grip on him and transferring it to another nearby branch.

To her shock, he shifted in place, until he was sitting easily on a thick branch, one of the last of that size at the height they were at.

“What now?” she asked. Her vision was still blocked.

“Now we climb,” he said, and put action to words, moving up slowly through the branches, until he had cleared the other trees around them.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she complained. “This is stupid. I’m going to slip and die. I’m such an idiot.”

Kean again wisely, very wisely, didn’t say anything.

“Okay, I can do this. Right? Just another what, twenty feet?”

“Twenty-five, yeah,” he agreed. “There are tons of branches, all of which will support your weight. I weigh a lot more and they give me no trouble. You can do this, Maddy,” he said supportively.

“Yeah, of course.”

She put her first foot up on a branch, looked ahead for handholds, and then with a silent prayer, pushed off, rising easily to the next level. “That wasn’t so bad,” she said as the tree began to sway less as his bear no longer was among its upper levels.

Maddy repeated it again, and then again, until she reached Kean’s height. Then, just to prove she could do it, she moved to a branch above him.

He just smiled up at her. “And there you go,” he said, gesturing out to the south, where she could easily see the Institute facility.

Reaching into her bag, she pulled free a pair of electronic binoculars. Her eyesight wasn’t nearly as good as Kean’s, so she’d have to make do with an artificial aid. The nice part was, they recorded what they saw, so she could pan it across the base, and then later review the footage to refresh her memory.

As she focused in on the buildings, it became evident that Kean had been right. There were a lot of women around. Her eyes went cold as she saw the differences in some of them.

They’re so much farther along than I thought. They’ve already begun. Are we too late?

They weren’t, obviously. This was just the beginning stages, on a small scale. Soon things would escalate, she was sure. The Institute had plans—very, very detailed plans. She’d not seen them herself, but she’d heard of them. And she did know this was the start of their final stage.

She had to stop them. No matter what.

“Madison,” Kean said sharply.

“What?” she asked, pulling the binoculars away from her eyes as the urgency of his tone registered.

“We need to go.”

She looked down at him to see that Kean wasn’t looking at her. Instead he was focused on the forest floor below.

“What is it?” she asked nervously, her voice automatically dropping into a whisper. She had a strong idea what he was about to say, but it was the last thing she wanted to hear.

“People are coming. We need to go. Now.”

Madison scanned the forest below, searching for signs of movement even as she listened. But she could hear nothing.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I hear nothing.”

“Trust me,” he told her. “I can hear them.”

His eyes were worried, she could see that now.

“Okay,” she said, reaching out and touching his hand where it rested on the branch next to her. “What do we do now?”

His hand twisted around to grab hers, taking it within his grip. To her surprise, Madison almost immediately felt herself calm, the rising beat of her heart that had started with his first alarming words slowing slightly.

“We need to go down. Fast.”

Right. Down. She peered straight down, the floor a dizzyingly long way below them. Instinctively her hands tightened on whatever they were gripping. Which included Kean’s hand. The shifter gave her a reassuring squeeze in return.

“Follow me as fast as you can,” he told her. “I’ll be there.”

She nodded once, not trusting herself to speak. Climb down fast? She wasn’t some sort of tree nut! She was going to slip and fall, ending up dead before their pursuers were even close enough for her to hear them.

There was no time to hesitate though, since Kean surely wouldn’t put her life into such a dangerous situation unless he had no choice. Which meant that she needed to start climbing down. Now.

Hissing angrily, she uncoiled herself from her seat and began to move down through the branches. Kean, to her annoyance, was already resting against the trunk in his bear form far below. She cursed his name silently as she moved from handhold to handhold, trusting her feet to find the branches below as she descended toward his massive form, waiting on the highest branch that would support his weight.

In the distance she heard the low whine of a motorized vehicle engine. Her head twisted around, searching for the source of the noise. The canopy was still too thick at that level though, too many leaves in her way, blocking her view.

Kean growled, urging her onward she was sure.

She reached him eventually, after what felt like an eternity. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she secured herself to him.

The engines grew louder. There could be no doubt about it either, there was more than one coming, and they were getting closer, faster. Someone must have spotted them up in the tree, or signs of their passing, perhaps. It didn’t matter what. They’d been found out, and now they needed to flee.

Looking down to the ground and then back to their level, Madison realized it was unlikely they were ever going to make it to the ground by climbing.

Kean, it seemed, realized that too. He shook slightly, and she grabbed tight. “I’m secure,” she snapped. “I can’t hold on any tighter. So whatever you’re going to do, just do it!”

She yelped as he lurched into motion. Not the slow reverse climbing that she had expected him to do as they descended. Instead Kean simply stepped out off the branch, and then his bear dug its claws into the bark to keep them close, and to keep their speed down. But there was no secure grip. They were sliding down the trunk at an incredible pace.

“Kean!” she shouted. “Kean I don’t think this is a good id—”

Her last word twisted into a scream as Kean suddenly released from the tree, flinging them out into open air. The pair plummeted downward. Madison screwed her eyes shut as the ground rushed up at them at an incredible pace. They were going to die. She knew it. They would hit the ground and break every bone in their bodies.

The powerful muscles of Kean’s neck came up and slapped her in the face as they hit the ground, jerking her body hard. Madison ignored the pain, squeezing tighter with her arms as his bear absorbed the fall, and then sprang forward at a long loping gait, moving as fast as his bear could through the forest.

Behind them the sounds of vehicles—too high-pitched to be cars or trucks, which meant something smaller, probably the ATVs Kean had told her about—came closer. His bear was moving faster and faster, but the vehicles had a head start on the acceleration, and being smaller than the bear in size, could maneuver better in the forest.

Without warning one of them came zipping out of the woods to the left and nearly rammed into their side. Both parties reacted instinctively, jerking away from each other to avoid a collision at high speed.

The ATV driver, unaware of his surroundings, drove his vehicle right into a tree as he pulled away. Flames exploded as the sleek vehicle crumpled into a hunk of twisted metal. Heat reached out and slapped Madison, but she was too busy worrying about holding on tight. The sudden change in direction from Kean had pulled one of her legs loose.

Now she hung onto his neck with her arms, her left leg still on top of his back as he rolled along, while her right leg hung down toward the ground. He was so huge she couldn’t actually reach the ground, even in that position.

Kean was still trying to recover from the earlier sudden movement, to get them back on course. He jerked left and then right frantically, trying to avoid trees. She felt his body jerk, and a smaller tree simply exploded into fragments as it shattered against the far side of his body. Thankfully she was protected from it, because the impact surely would have killed her if it had struck on the same side as her.

The bear roared in pain, but it kept moving. The sheer size of his animal meant that sudden, unplanned course changes at high speed resulted in a lot of mass being flung about.

“Kean, I can’t hold on for much longer!” she shouted as he swerved around another tree.

Her left leg was slipping off of him, no matter how hard she tried to throw it back up and over, to get herself reseated on his back. Kean’s head swung around, noticing her predicament for the first time. He growled, keeping one eye on their course, which seemed clear for a little bit. Then he reached out, stuck his snout between her and his side, and then flicked her back up and onto him.

Madison yelped at being treated so bodily, but it worked. She landed hard on his back, some of the wind being knocked out of her. But it didn’t matter, she was back in position, and they could focus on getting out of there.

“All right!” she shouted, raising one hand up to whoop as Kean surged ahead—

Right into the path of an oncoming ATV that had approached from the left while his head was turned back the other way to help her.

The bear simply obliterated the vehicle, charging right up and over the machine, narrowly avoiding trampling its rider.

But to do so, Kean had to slow his pace and jump, to avoid tripping over it.

Madison, with only one hand to hold onto Kean, the other raised high in the air, was thrown free as he jerked and then lifted upward.

“KEAN!” she screamed, sailing through the air.

The bear roared.

Madison hit the ground. She bounced once, then twice, then a third time, rolling end over end rapidly, until she slid to a halt in a pile of dead leaves.