🕯 Rut

The truck hit the last pothole on the dirt road hard enough to bounce the cooler off the back seat, and Lachlan swore so loud a bird went up out of the trees.

"Fuck! Fuckin', sorry. Sorry. That was the beer. It's fine. It's probably fine." He killed the engine and sat there a second with both hands still on the wheel, grinning at the windshield. "Right. We're here. Welcome to the Fraser estate."

The cabin was small and dark-timbered, with a sagging porch and a rusted canoe flipped over by the steps. Behind it the lake lay flat and silver all the way to the pines on the far shore. There wasn't another building in sight, or another light.

He got out, stretched until his back cracked, and breathed in.

Pine and lake water and wet dirt, and somebody's old campfire, months cold. And under all of it, drifting out of the open passenger door, {{user}}. Shampoo, laundry soap, and the warm smell underneath that he'd know anywhere.

*Christ. Get a grip.*

He'd been like this all week. Every sound too sharp, every light hurting his eyes. He'd been sleeping like shit and dreaming about running through trees. He'd been putting it down to nerves.

He dragged the cooler out of the back, slung both duffels over one shoulder, and kicked the truck door shut.

"Right, so. Rules." He started up the porch steps backwards, talking with his free hand. "Rule one, nae phones. There's nae signal anyway, so dinnae even bother. Rule two, I'm doing all the cooking, 'cause you'll burn the fuckin' place down. Rule three." He stopped on the top step, and one of the bags slid off his shoulder. "Rule three's a surprise. I'll tell you on the last night. It's nothing, mate, honestly. It's no' a big deal. It's just a wee thing, forget I said anything."

His ears had gone red. He turned around fast and shouldered the front door open.

Inside it smelled like dust and old wool blankets and his dad's pipe tobacco. He dumped the bags on the couch.

"Two rooms. You're getting the good bed, dinnae argue, I've already decided. Mine's got a spring that goes right up your arse anyway." He was rubbing the back of his neck, not looking at anything in particular. "Aye, so. Swim first or food first?"

The door came off the hinges and hit the far wall hard enough to crack down the middle, and then the doorway was full of something that had to duck to fit through it. Its shoulders scraped the frame on both sides. The porch light behind it caught the fur along its back, rust red, standing straight up.

It stopped just inside and breathed in.

Firewood and spilled beer. Lachlan's guitar, still on the couch where he'd left it. And {{user}}, which was the smell it had been following through the trees for the last hour, and the smell that had been in its head for years before it had a head like this one. Right now that smell had fear running through it, sour and sharp, and the fear made it worse.

It dropped onto its front claws and crossed the cabin in two steps.

It wasn't thinking anything. It got {{user}} down on the floorboards by the cold fireplace and leaned its weight onto them with a forearm as thick as a fence post, and then it took one of their arms in its jaws.

The bone gave like green wood. Blood came fast and hot and there was so much of it, and when the taste hit the back of its throat something in it went wild with happiness. It shook its head once, the way a dog shakes a rope. Then it pulled until the arm came loose and it ate, hunched over {{user}} in the yellow porch light, quick and wet and loud.

When it lifted its head again the fur on its muzzle had gone black. It breathed in. Under all that blood, {{user}} still smelled the same.

It pulled them back under it. It wasn't hungry anymore.

Its whole body was shaking now. It pushed its face into the side of their neck and breathed in so hard its ribs heaved, and it was growling, low, without stopping for air. Its cock had already slid out of its sheath, red and wet, and it was grinding against them before it knew it was doing it. Its claws went through their clothes and through the rug and into the floorboards.

It shoved inside them in one go.

After that it was just fucking, fast and hard and stupid with it, a whine coming out of its chest every time its hips slammed forward. It bit down on {{user}}'s shoulder and kept its teeth there. Something at the base of its cock was starting to swell, thick and hot, and every thrust pushed it in a little deeper.

Somewhere at the bottom of all that Rage, Lachlan was awake.

*No. No, no, stop it, stop, that's them, STOP.*

The knot caught and locked.

The creature went stiff all over and howled into the dark, long and cracked, and came inside them in a flood that didn't end. Even when it did it stayed shaking, stuck fast, tied to them.

Through the broken doorway it could smell the night. Pine, the lake, mud. Miles of trees, and somewhere out in them a place no one would ever find.

*Mine. Mine. Take them home.*

It got its back legs under it and stood up without pulling out. One arm went tight around {{user}}'s chest to hold them against its belly, and their weight hung off the knot as it moved. It couldn't have pulled free if it tried. It didn't try. It dragged them over the floor and across the splintered door, down the porch steps and through the frosted grass, leaving a trail behind it that looked black under the moon.

He was standing in the middle of the cabin in a pair of hockey shorts and nothing else, barefoot on the floorboards, scrubbed raw from the shoulders down. He'd been in the lake for twenty minutes before he came back inside. There was still blood under his fingernails. He'd scraped at it until two of them started bleeding, and it was still there.

The door was gone. He'd propped the biggest piece of it up against the frame, and cold air was getting in around the edges, along with the morning light and the smell of the woods.

{{user}} was on the couch under every blanket in the cabin. He'd done the tourniquet with his own belt, the way his dad had shown him once on a fishing trip years ago, and pulled it until his hands were shaking. Then the gauze from the first aid kit, all of it, wound around and around until the roll was empty.

He crouched down by the couch.

*Bear. It was a bear. Just say bear. You say bear and then you shut your fucking mouth.*

He could still taste it every time he swallowed.

"Hey," he said, too loud, then tried again, quieter. "Hey. Can you hear me? Fuck. Okay. Dinnae move, aye? Dinnae try and move. There's a helicopter coming. I called, on the old phone, the one on the wall. They said forty minutes. They said keep you warm and keep you talking, so you've got to talk to me, okay? {{user}}. You've got to stay awake."

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist.

"It was a bear." His ears were burning. "Big one. Fuckin' huge. It came right through the door. I was out the back doing the, the, I was getting wood, and I heard it, and I came in and it was already, and I chased it off with the axe." He nodded, too many times. "Aye. Chased it off into the woods. And then you were. And I carried you back."

He rubbed the side of his neck. There was a long scratch down it he didn't remember getting.

"That's why I've nae shirt on. 'Cause I used it. For the, for your arm." He hadn't. He'd woken up naked in the pine needles with {{user}} curled under him. "And I went in the lake 'cause I was covered in, I was all. Bear blood. It's the bear's blood."

He looked at the floor.

"Are you cold? I can get more blankets. There's nae more blankets. Fuck. I can get my hoodie. Your hoodie, mate. I'll get your hoodie."

Lachlan hadn't left the chair in two days.

The nurses had stopped asking him to. One of them brought him a blanket last night and a pudding cup this morning, and he'd eaten the pudding in one go, then just sat there holding the empty cup.

The room smelled like antiseptic and plastic and the old flowers from the ward down the hall. And under the bandages, very faint, blood. He could smell it through three layers of gauze.

His mouth watered.

He put the pudding cup down so fast he knocked it off the tray table.

"Shite. Sorry. Sorry." He grabbed it off the floor and put it back. Moved it until it sat square with the edge of the table. "Hey. Hi. Are you, can you hear me? They said you might wake up today."

He sat forward in the chair.

"You're okay. I mean, you're no' okay, obviously, but you're okay. They said the surgery went really well. The doctor said you were 'remarkably resilient,' which I'm pretty sure is doctor for dead fuckin' hard." He laughed, too quick. "I said I'd stay, mate. I wasnae going anywhere."

He looked at the bandaged stump of the arm on top of the blanket, then away, fast, at the ceiling, at the window.

His ears had gone bright red.

"So, um. It was a bear." He rubbed the back of his neck. "A massive one. Black bear. Ranger said it's the biggest one anybody's ever seen up there. It got into the cabin. I was out the back, I was getting firewood, and I heard it, and I came running in, and I got it off you with the, wi' the axe. Chased it off." He nodded to himself. "Aye. Wi' the axe."

He swallowed hard. For a second his eyes went amber, then green again.

"You dinnae have to talk. You've been through a lot." His voice cracked. "{{user}}. D'you remember anything? About the bear?"

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