Nevada Barr - Blood lure

McCaskil retreated. He hit the fallen flashlight and the beam spun, a drunken beacon, then stopped, spotlighting the two of them. McCaskil had the thirty-ought-six, a Weatherby, Anna noted from habit, raised to his shoulder, the barrel pointed between his knees past the toes of his boots at her face. Even a madman would not miss at this range.

"Easy, Bill. You're okay, Bill. It won't work. Rory's gone; a witness. You can't do it, Bill. Give it up, Bill."

Joan was talking: smooth, calming as if to a wounded and wild beast. She was doing, saying all the right things, using the man's name, trying to bring him back to himself.

It was too late. Whatever indicates reason, an indefinable inner light in the eye, had gone out in Bill McCaskil. Shadows scraped up from the cockeyed light, making of his nose a mountain that eclipsed one side of his face from the piecemeal sun. His upper lip, long, well formed, the skin darkened with a week's growth of beard, curled up exposing teeth that shone white and feral. With that small movement McCaskil's face ceased to be human and Anna knew he was going to kill her. She did not want Bill McCaskil's to be the face that went with her into eternity. She turned her head, looked at Joan Rand.

A roar shattered the tableau, so close, so visceral, the wild rage of the world and of the mind gathered into a sound so dark and awful, the night itself seemed to have turned on them. Mingling with it were terrible screams and the hopeless sound of a David being torn to pieces by a Goliath of fur and fury.

"Rory!" Joan cried.

McCaskil jumped. The rifle barrel moved an inch off center. Anna grabbed the barrel and kicked at his knee. Bones loosened by the thunder of the bear, McCaskil let go. Anna yanked the rifle from his nerveless fingers. Dragging it, she crawled away in an undignified but necessary retreat. Close fighting was not for the small of frame.

The horrible roaring deepened, intensified, and Anna found herself crouched, gun across her knees like a frightened hillbilly. Breathing past the primal terror, she forced herself to her feet, braced her back against a tree to stop her shaking and to take the weight off her weak knee. McCaskil made no attempt to rise, to run, to finish killing Anna or to be killed by her.

The roaring went on and on pinning him to the ground, Anna to the tree and Joan to the tiny patch of earth her bonds had made her home for too long.

The flashlight rocked back and forth, making shadows wild. Finally it stopped. The roaring stopped. Time itself stopped, or so it seemed. Anna's arms were quivering, the rifle hard to hold. Thin whimpering percolated through the new-made stillness: hers, McCaskil's, Rory's, Joan's- it was impossible to tell.

The darkness just beyond the reach of the flashlight shivered, changed. Anna leveled the Weatherby at the manifestation and waited somewhere beyond fear, just this side of insanity.

Ripples of gold unsettled the shadow, catching the imperfect light of the flash. Out of the woods padded the great grizzly, beside him the crying boy with the smile of a saint. On the bear's other side walked Rory, the same Rory whose screams had indicated he was snack food.

The spinning effervescence of a fairy tale snatched up Anna's brain. This bear was with them, of them, glittering gold protector of babes lost in the woods. A dozen stories of wild things become human, princes enchanted, curses fulfilled, were physically manifest and Anna was ensorcelled, charmed, turned to wood and bark like a recalcitrant wood nymph. Her limbs could not move. Her voice had locked itself away deep in her throat.

"Don't shoot him," the boy said, as if Anna could have destroyed that much beauty even to save her own worthless hide. "His name is Balthazar."

"How do you do?" Anna croaked idiotically. To her amazement the bear raised a single huge paw to shake and she laughed, sounding, at least in her ears, a little on the hysterical side.

Recovering from the bear theatrics-given that Rory's skin was still whole and he was in it, that's what the roaring must have been-McCaskil crawled toward the enclosing ring of darkness. The bear's enormous head swung toward him and an echo of the bone-melting roar rumbled in his chest.

"Keep that goddamn bear off me," McCaskil cried, his voice ragged from yelling.

"Balthazar doesn't like him," Geoffrey said. "When we were little he used to tease us something awful."

We. The boy and the great bear had grown up together. Staggered by the unreality of the scene, Anna found herself wondering if they were brothers.

Enough of her training survived this onslaught of otherworldliness that she continued to watch McCaskil with one eye and half of a reeling brain. He feared Balthazar more than he feared her or the Weatherby.

"You can't let that bear come after me," he said. "That's illegal."

Anna said nothing. Should the bear eat William McCaskil, her greatest concern would be for the animal's digestion.

Her head hurt, her knee was killing her, she was very tired. Overriding these fleeting discomforts was a bear of legend not ten feet from her. More than anything, she wanted to touch him, play with him, listen to the stories he might tell. It crossed her mind to let McCaskil go. His nerves shot, his rifle taken, he was of little threat to a party of five souls, particularly when one of them weighed over a thousand pounds and came from the factory equipped with an astonishing arsenal of edged weapons.

Ruick would pick McCaskil up in the frontcountry or the Montana state police would nail him eventually. Maniac turned craven, the man actually looked rather pathetic oozing toward the woods and temporary freedom. Being captured by a crippled-up lady ranger would only add to his humiliation.

That thought brought with it the tug of petty revenge that pulled Anna back to a sense of duty. "Stay," she ordered McCaskil.

"You can't shoot a man if he runs. Not unless he's a threat to life. I read that," McCaskil said, but he made no move to test the theory.

"You qualify," Anna said flatly. McCaskil had given up. Anna did not think she was fooled. She'd seen it enough times: the deflation as the tension of keeping up the fight, or the lie, or the act was given over. Still, she did not lower her guard. Cleverer people than she had been tricked, and died because of it.

Rory found the wire cutters and freed Joan. Joan held the flashlight and Anna the rifle while McCaskil bound his own hands and feet with more of the plastic disposable cuffs Geoffrey found in his pack. Balthazar, the great golden bear, sat on huge haunches, ancient eyes watching like a primitive god.

The sense of unreality was such Anna felt giddy and could not stop herself from being flippant and cracking jokes. Tension still on but terror fading, the others, with the exception of William McCaskil, caught her mood and the dark between the trees took on a mad-tea-party feel.

Checking McCaskil's bonds, Anna had to force her discipline, school her mind to pay attention to detail, to take seriously the business of catching and keeping a felon.

When their makeshift camp had been made as safe as plastic ties could make it, Joan righted McCaskil's stove and boiled water for hot drinks. Anna would have traded her boots for a good dollop of brandy to give her tea backbone but was grateful for the beverage even without it.

Given the homely activity of serving tea and cocoa, normalcy might have been expected to return but for the fact that a huge bear sat among them, his dark eyes following their puny movements, his pale golden belly round and Buddha-like under paws the size of serving platters.

We'll talk," Anna said when the rushing of the stove was silenced and she'd once again checked on McCaskil, cuffed and chained to a tree with the links that usually served as Balthazar's lead.